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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Who will ever know if any of those Eton boys ever longed for one another as they lay sleepless in their separate cells, each strumming the guitar of sex and humming who knows what tune or if they felt desire as I did during wrestling practice for the wiry, crew-cut boy with the sand in his eyes and the bluish false teeth that had replaced those lost in a bloody match last year, a boy who seemed to be everywhere at once and who, in spite of the sleepiness of his expression, crackled like a field of static electricity above me, a shower of sparks in gym shorts as he darted all over, found the exact point of leverage and effortlessly pulled me down. The Russians practice a kind of photography, called Kirlian, that reveals the subject’s aura, the varying patterns of radiant heat projected by his limbs as a kind of oriflamme, if that means the golden banner a knight wraps himself in. For me every male body inhabited just such a rippling flag, just such a field of force invisible to all eyes but mine—but to mine resplendent and dangerous, a smooth sheath though upon close inspection engraved with fine lines of tension. How else can I explain the way I’d swallow hard and begin to lose my sense of balance whenever one of these enigma machines came toward me? At that time I had a book on Rodin. Every afternoon I’d sit on my cot and look at a black-and-white photograph of an early sculpture, “The Age of Bronze,” a nude study of a Belgian soldier so realistic that the artist had been accused of casting it from life. I didn’t masturbate over that picture, nor did I imagine coupling with the statue or the soldier. No, I loved him and I told him so, again and again, in whispers that never sounded right because I could never figure out who I was—his son? wife? brother? enemy? husband? friend? And there was the other problem of the century that separated me from the long-dead model and of the continent from the distant replica. I told myself that if I ever found him I’d know how to love him, but I had mistaken yearning for talent and I’d neglected to sort out the most essential thing, my own identity. Perhaps that’s why I’d become so enamored of a statue, for with it the only amorous activity could be the circle of my steps around that still form. No encounter, no vying for position, no chance of perfect understanding or total confusion.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was at least half a foot taller than Kevin. We both had erections and we pulled our suits open under the cold water and looked down at them. Kevin pointed out that there were two openings at the head of his penis, separated by just the thinnest isthmus of flesh. I touched his penis and he touched mine. “Somebody might see us,” I said, backing away. “So what,” he said. For quite a while we lolled on the deck. One opulent drop of water rolled down his high, compact chest into the hollow between his nipples, the right one still small and white from the cold, the left fuller and just beginning to color. The other drops were not so heavy; studding his body impressionistically with light, they didn’t move; they slowly evaporated. His sides and childishly rounded stomach dried faster than the glossy epaulets on his shoulders. For a second a diamond depended from his nose. Three or four houses away, little kids were screaming in the water. One was impersonating a motorboat, another had comically lowered her voice. An older boy was trying to scare the younger ones; he was a bomber, they helpless civilians, and his way of imitating a plane was really very good. The kids were thrilled and squealed. Some of them were laughing, though their laughter contained no warmth, no irony and no humor. Kevin was restless; he belly-flopped into the water, spraying me, stood, turned and scudded more water at me with the heel of his hand. I knew I should shout “Geronimo!” and leap in after him, clamber up on his back and push him under. The horseplay would dissolve the tension and sexual melancholy; my body would become not a snare but a friendly sort of weapon. But I couldn’t go against the decorum of my own fantasies, which were all romantic. Kevin swam freestyle away from me, way out to the white diving raft. I watched, then rested my head on the board beside my arm. A tiny ant shaped like a dumbbell crawled through the flaring, glittering hairs on my forearm. The water flowing through the pylons under me gurgled. I propped myself up on my elbow and watched Kevin diving. After a bit he found what looked like the pink plastic lid of a bucket. He tossed it again and again into the air and swam to retrieve it. The late sun, masked once more by clouds, did not send its path across the water toward us but hollowed out beneath it a golden amphitheater. The light was behind Kevin; when he held up the disk it went as pale and seductive as a pink hibiscus. His head was about the same size as the lid.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  10Sometimes … Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride—and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look—a gray furry question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours–how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and—“Pulease, leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story. 11One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me to come over for a talk. Dolly’s last report had been poor, I knew. But instead of contenting myself with some such plausible explanation of this summons, I imagined all sorts of horrors, and had to fortify myself with a pint of my “pin” before I could face the interview. Slowly, all Adam’s apple and heart, I went up the steps of the scaffold. A huge woman, gray-haired, frowsy, with a broad flat nose and small eyes behind black-rimmed glasses—“Sit down,” she said, pointing to an informal and humiliating hassock, while she perched with ponderous spryness on the arm of an oak chair. For a moment or two, she peered at me with smiling curiosity. She had done it at our first meeting, I recalled, but I could afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into thought—probably assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed, fold on fold, her dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a trace of chalk or something. Then she said, still rubbing, not looking up: “Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-fashioned Continental father, aren’t you?” “Why, no,” I said, “conservative, perhaps, but not what you would call old-fashioned.” She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner, and again fixed her beady eyes upon me. “Dolly Haze,” she said, “is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual maturing seems to give her trouble.” I bowed slightly. What else could I do?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a “typewriter tablet”; then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand in the little black book just mentioned. May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of “abdominal flu” (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June. Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window) saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body. After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet—pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip—and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—this is agony—a second time. Ping. Marvelous skin—oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. God, what agony, that silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bone twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle. “The McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.” Ping. The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she got up to take in the wash, I had a chance of adoring from afar the faded seat of her rolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland Mrs. Haze, complete with camera, grew up like a fakir’s fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing—sad eyes up, glad eyes down—had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat blinking on the steps, Humbert le Bel.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence, and the sappy tall trees seemed to be in the know; and desire, even stronger than before, began to afflict me again. Let her come soon, I prayed, addressing a loan God, and while mamma is in the kitchen, let a repetition of the davenport scene be staged, please, I adore her so horribly. No: “horribly” is the wrong word. The elation with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic—because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child. And now see how I was repaid for my pains. No Lolita came home—she had gone with the Chatfields to a movie. The table was laid with more elegance than usual: candlelight, if you please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs. Haze gently touched the silver on both sides of her plate as if touching piano keys, and smiled down on her empty plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped I liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman’s magazine). She hoped I liked the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs. Chatfield was a lovely person. Phyllis, her daughter, was going to a summer camp tomorrow. For three weeks. Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday. Instead of waiting till July, as had been initially planned. And stay there after Phyllis had left. Till school began. A pretty prospect, my heart. Oh, how I was taken aback—for did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine? To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. Must have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us. “Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room. “Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?” Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass. “Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.” Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina! When the dessert was plunked down—a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream for her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie—I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopper, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep. “Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?” “Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.” “No, seriously—please.” “Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?” Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel night. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and its door banged. A little after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in several installments, from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really a monologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds to listen (presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and so no real meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was already suffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, one after the other, and the clattering and whining elevator began to rise and take down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed, and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage Dr. Boyd said “Good morning to you” in a fruity voice, and birds were busy in the trees, and then Lolita yawned. Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “Here we are nymphs and in heaven are stars; 9 ere Beatrice descended to the world we were ordained to her for her handmaids. 10 We will lead thee to her eyes; but the three on the other side who deeper gaze, will sharpen thine eyes to the joyous light that is within.” Thus singing they began; and then did lead me with them up to the breast of the griffin, where Beatrice stood turned towards us. They said: “Look that thou spare not thine eyes; we have placed thee before the emeralds 11 whence Love once drew his shafts at thee.” 12 A thousand desires hotter than flame held mine eyes bound to the shining eyes, which remained ever fixed upon the griffin. As the sun in a mirror, not otherwise the twofold beast was beaming within them, now with the attributes of one, now of the other nature. Think, reader, if I marvelled within me when I saw the thing itself remain motionless, and in its image it was changing. 13 While my soul, filled with wonderment and glad, was tasting of that food which, satisfying of itself, causes thirst of itself, 14 the other three, showing them to be of the chiefest order in their bearing, drew forward, dancing to their angelic roundelay. “Turn, Beatrice, turn thy holy eyes,” was their song, “to thy faithful one, who to see thee hath moved so many steps. Of thy grace do us the grace that thou unveil thy mouth to him, that he may discern the second beauty which thou hidest.” 15 O glory of living eternal, who that so pale hath grown beneath the shade of Parnassus, or hath drunk at its well, that would not seem to have mind encumbered, on trying to render thee as thou appearedest, when in the free air thou didst disclose thee, where heaven in its harmony shadows thee forth? 1. The water of Lethe (see Canto xxviii and later in the present canto). 2. good = God; others [goods] = worldly ideals. 3. Confession, by softening the Divine wrath, blunts the edge of the sword of Justice. Cf. Canto viii, and the first interpretation given in note 3. 4. It seems best not to attempt to identify the young damsel. 5. Cf. Prov. i. 17, in the Vulgate. 6. wind of ours—the wind blows from the north of Europe (the continent in which Italy is); the south wind comes from Africa, called “Iarbas’ land” from the Libyan king of that name, one of Dido’s suitors (see Æn. iv). 7. The angels; cf. Inf. vii and Purg. xi. 8. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Ps. li. 7). 9. See Canto i, note 3 10. It is quite natural for those who argue that Beatrice is a purely allegorical character to insist on this passage as implying her pre-existence in heaven, before her incarnation as an earthly maiden. The passage, however, does not necessarily imply this, for it is only carrying a little further the familiar language employed by Dante in the Vita Nuova, § xxvi, the sonnet; Conv. iv. 28; Purg. xx and xxi; Par. xxx—all indicating that the soul comes from heaven. From the assertion that the ascent to heaven at death is a return, it is but a very small step to describe the birth as a descent to the world. 11. The eyes of Beatrice are called “emeralds,” not with reference to their colour, but because of their brightness (shining eyes). 12. Cf. Vita Nuova § xxi, the first line of the sonnet: “My lady carries love within her eyes.” This idea occurs elsewhere in Dante’s poems and is a commonplace with his predecessors and contemporaries. 13. This passage is to be taken in a purely allegorical sense. “We may read in Revelation now the divine and now the human attributes of Christ; but the human mind is incapable of combining them. As we contemplate Revelation we may see now one and now the other, but not both at once.” 14. Cf. the words of Wisdom in Eccles. xxiv. 21: “They that eat me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall yet be thirsty.” 15. See the canzone in the third book of the Convito, which runs at follows: “Her aspect shows delight of Paradise, Seen in her eyes and in her smiling face; Love brought them there as to his dwelling-place.” From Dante’s commentary to the words Dico negli occhi e nel suo dolce riso (ib. 8), it seems probable that the second beauty to which the theological virtues are now leading Dante, is the smile of Beatrice; the cardinal virtues having guided him to her eyes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “I see you are not too favorably impressed,” said the lady letting her hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she combined a cool forwardness—the overflow of what I think is called “poise”—with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of “speech.” “This is not a neat household, I confess,” the doomed dear continued, “but I assure you [she looked at my lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show you the garden” (the last more brightly, with a kind of winsome toss of the voice). Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house—the side where also the dining room and the parlor were (under “my” room, on the left, there was nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish woman, said, as she took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the door leading to the back porch: “I’ll go now, Mrs. Haze.” “Yes, Louise,” answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. “I’ll settle with you Friday.” We passed on to a small pantry and entered the dining room, parallel to the parlor we had already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory grunt, Mrs. Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I groped for the timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery—“the piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I’d seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. “We just blew into town,” he said. “I hope you can make us feel at home.” He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they’d been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man—younger and more handsome than I’d imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn’t at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn’t been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn’t bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn’t keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant’s door). The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles. Because I knew these books were by living writers I looked down on them; my head was still ringing with the full bravura performance of history in the library—opera house. Those old books either had never owned or had lost their wrappers; the likenesses of their unpictured authors had been re-created within the brown, brittle pages. But these living writers—ah! life struck me as an enfeeblement, a proof of dimmed vitality when compared to the energetic composure of the dead whose busts, all carved beards and sightless, protuberant eyes, I imagined filling the empty niches above the opera doors under a portico, which was now home to sleeping bums and stray cats but once the splendid approach across diamonds of black-and-white-marble pavement to black-and-gilt doors opening on the brilliant assembly, the fans and diamonds and the magic fire circling the sleeping woman.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphan aux yeux battus (and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little Mägdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But “in a wink,” as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again—in fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest. “How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully. I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine P.M. “We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?” “Uh-huh.” “Sorry to leave?” “Un-un.” “Talk, Lo—don’t grunt. Tell me something.” “What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation). “Any old thing.” “Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road). “Quite.” “It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter—and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular—O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole and corrected the tune I had been mutilating. She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place—“gracious living” and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator’s gate—some twenty yards northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple—alternated with the banging and booming of the machine’s various evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct my viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake—a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees—degenerated into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night. And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped, muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed, within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, her arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace—doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same: Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume—oh, how fast the magic potion worked!—and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling—wouldn’t you like me to tell you?—half closing her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones. “If I tell you—if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy—head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won’t make complaints?” “Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.” “Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. “Lemme tell you—” “Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed—for goodness sake, to bed.” I pocketed the key and walked downstairs. 28Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time! So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties—she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in—after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes—say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say—I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, emprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,—indeed, the globe—that very same night.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from the hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came back with two tall glasses of pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden void within my chest made me stop as I saw that the tennis court was deserted. I stooped to set down the glasses on a bench and for some reason, with a kind of icy vividness, saw Charlotte’s face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path in the company of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I sprang after them, but as I was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if life’s course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball. I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time. How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her right hand holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered, damp-smelling sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her turn the repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms, and step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before dinner. “Whose cat has scratched poor you?” a full-blown fleshy handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive might ask me at the “lodge,” during a table d’hôte dinner followed by dancing promised to Lo. This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Forever is a traditional teenage love story with a twist, and that twist has a name: Ralph. Ralph is what the male character calls his penis. Boy and girl meet; boy and girl get swept off their feet—and then, oh hello, Ralph has joined the party. Forever was the first book of its kind to show a young couple’s sexual journey. The writing is explicit, for sure; there are descriptions of nudity, orgasms, and semen. But Judy was careful to avoid pitfalls that would make Forever easily dismissible as smut. For one thing, the emotional relationship between the pair is just as nuanced as their physical connection. Equally important, Blume is intentional in the way she presents the two main characters. They aren’t rebels or burnouts or outsiders, sneaking around in the streets after dark. They’re sweet, wholesome kids. Michael and Katherine are seniors in high school: she’s from Westfield, New Jersey, and he’s from the neighboring town of Summit. They meet at a mutual friend’s fondue party—the tamest possible teenage get-together—where they flirt and banter. The next day, they go on a drive and talk about their interests. They’re both athletes, with Michael a skier and Katherine an avid tennis player. The colleges on their wish lists are competitive: Penn State, University of Vermont, Middlebury. Michael’s favorite food is literally spinach! Katherine tells Michael that she volunteers at the local hospital once a week as a candy striper. Katherine in particular is family oriented. Her dad is her most frequent tennis partner; the first thing she does after her date with Michael is go home and tell her mom about him. Her younger sister, Jamie, is a precociously talented artist and cook, but Katherine doesn’t let her own insecurities get in the way of their sisterly bond. Other details, offered early in the novel, telegraph Katherine’s level-headedness. She has a “92 average” in school, and she’s thin. “We are exactly the same size—five-feet-six and 109 pounds,” she says of her and her mother. It’s one of the few times Blume provides a physical description as specific as a character’s weight. You get the sense that she’s using Katherine’s svelte body as a shorthand for self-control, which wouldn’t fly now but was par for the course in the diet-obsessed 1970s. When it comes to sex, Katherine is equally disciplined. She’s still a virgin and broke up with her last boyfriend, she tells us, because he pressured her in bed. “He threatened that if I wouldn’t sleep with him he’d find somebody else who would,” she says. “I told him if that was all he cared about he should go right ahead.” Like Judy, Katherine has been warned by her parents about the dangers of parking. After her second date with Michael, she invites him back to her house, where they make out in the den. Michael wants to go farther, but Katherine holds him off, dutifully performing her role as the good girl.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He pulls the sheet halfway up his chest, so that whatever happens under it will seem less sordid—or so he tells himself. (The truth is, the sheet declares the autonomy of desire, just as a tan line, by isolating the genitals, emphasizes them.) His dark hand pulls open the pajama flap and grabs his penis, which in a moment is as hard as hickory, but his thoughts are scattered, the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak. He assembles the features of various girls he’s known or seen in magazines or movies into a face he kisses, then violates—wrong, cancel—kisses again. And then he sees mental pictures of that time Julie and he were lying on the rug and talking about their futures. They were going to different colleges, they’d be apart for a year, suddenly his hand is rubbing those panties over a mound that just barely hints through the thick spandex that there might be an opening below—and then he’s wriggled under the armor into something flossy, ringleted and then hot and wet and labyrinthine and straining up to meet his fingers even as her throat moans no and she gasps, “Too sweet, you’re so …” And she buried her face in his sleeve, bit a fold in his shirt. She pulled away and sat him on a chair across the room from her and mimed fluffing her skirt and straightening her hair and said, “There, now,” but she didn’t turn on the lights, he noticed, and in a moment he had scooted back over and was sitting on the floor below her chair and he was kissing her knee very tenderly, respectfully, but his hand was straying almost in spite of itself back up between her smooth warm legs, as lean as a boy’s, as warm as new bread, while his other hand clawed at his own trousers and he whispered, hoarse and dry-mouthed, “Julie, just let me, just this much, something to remember—” I came. I had seen. He could conquer me. If I was Julie or Helen or whoever else, just so long as I was in his mind somehow. Or no, perhaps I didn’t want to be a character in Mr. Pouchet’s head, just a virus that had entered the very gland of his consciousness from which I could study, even experience, his longing for a woman. I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even me as a man but me as discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naive, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have reserved for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards—presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder—I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid—a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing—and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note—and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she came with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me—wanted the funnies—and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones—a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir—but she had already yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with one of the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit—but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud. Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into rain, and Lo made a scene. The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies for individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet. I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  21“Lo! Lola! Lolita!” I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun, with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my call and its tell-tale hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it would have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I found her at last—she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and then would bounce away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not swim with my heart in that state, but who cared—and there she was, and there was I, in my robe—and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in the pattern of her motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra, struck me … there was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s countenance—the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once, who used to counteract his “sprees” (he drank beer with milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting—tottering and grunting on a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his nape walked back with false insouciance to the pool. And as if the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.