Despair

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our marriage went from bad to worse. Brian stopped fucking me. I would beg and plead and ask what was wrong with me. I began to hate myself, to feel ugly, unloved, bodily odoriferous—all the classic symptoms of the unfucked wife; I began to have fantasies of zipless fucks with doormen, derelicts, countermen at the West End Bar, graduate students—even (God help me!) professors. I would sit in my “Proseminar in Eighteenth-Century English Lit.” listening to some creepy graduate student drone on and on about Nahum Tate’s revisions of Shakespeare’s plays, and meanwhile I would imagine myself sucking off each male member (hah) of the class. Sometimes I would imagine myself actually fucking Professor Harrington Stanton, a fiftyish proper Bostonian with a well-connected New England family behind him—a family renowned for politics, poetry, and psychosis. Professor Stanton had a wild laugh and always called James Boswell Bozzy—as if he drank with him nightly at the West End (which, indeed, I suspected him of doing). Somebody once referred to Stanton as “very brilliant but not quite plugged in.” It was apt. Despite being well-connected socially, he flickered on and off between sanity and insanity, never staying in one state long enough for you to know where you stood. How would Professor Stanton fuck? He was fascinated with eighteenth-century dirty words. Perhaps he would whisper “coun,” “cullion,” “crack” (for “cunt,” “testicles,” “pussy”) in my ear as we screwed? Perhaps he would turn out to have his family crest tattooed on his foreskin? I would be sitting there chuckling to myself at these fantasies and Professor Stanton would beam at me, thinking I was chuckling at one of his own wisecracks. But what was the use of these pathetic fantasies? My husband had stopped fucking me. He thought he was working hard enough as it was. I cried myself to sleep every night, or else went into the bathroom to masturbate after he fell asleep. I was twenty-one and a half years old and desperate. In retrospect, it all seems so simple. Why didn’t I find someone else? Why didn’t I have an affair or leave him or insist on some sort of sexual freedom arrangement? But I was a good girl of the fifties. I had grown up finger-fucking to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I had never slept with any man but my husband. I had petted “above the waist” and “below the waist” according to some mysterious unwritten rules of propriety. But an affair with another man seemed so radical that I couldn’t even consider it. Besides, I was sure that Brian’s failure to fuck me was my fault, not his. Either I was a nymphomaniac (because I wanted to be fucked more than once a month) or else it was just that I was so unattractive. Or maybe it was Brian’s age that was the problem. I had been raised on the various sexual myths of the fifties like:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking it as avidly as if it could give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom, a tiny concubine. For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the wooshing pines. In the middle distance, two little maidens in shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled privy marked “Women.” Gum-chewing Mabel (or Mabel’s understudy) laboriously, absent-mindedly, straddled a bicycle, and Marion, shaking her hair because of the flies, settled behind, legs wide apart; and, wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged with the light and shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these woods! The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert. But how? No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it. There was the famous dispatch of a Mme Lacour in Arles, southern France, at the close of last century. An unidentified bearded six-footer, who, it was later conjectured, had been the lady’s secret lover, walked up to her in a crowded street, soon after her marriage to Colonel Lacour, and mortally stabbed her in the back, three times, while the Colonel, a small bulldog of a man, hung onto the murderer’s arm. By a miraculous and beautiful coincidence, right at the moment when the operator was in the act of loosening the angry little husband’s jaws (while several onlookers were closing in upon the group), a cranky Italian in the house nearest to the scene set off by sheer accident some kind of explosive he was tinkering with, and immediately the street was turned into a pandemonium of smoke, falling bricks and running people. The explosion hurt no one (except that it knocked out game Colonel Lacour); but the lady’s vengeful lover ran when the others ran—and lived happily ever after. Now look what happens when the operator himself plans a perfect removal. I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we and a few other “nice” couples (the Farlows, the Chatfields) bathed was a kind of small cove; my Charlotte liked it because it was almost “a private beach.” The main bathing facilities (or “drowning facilities” as the Ramsdale Journal had had occasion to say) were in the left (eastern) part of the hourglass, and could not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the pines soon gave way to a curve of marshland which turned again into forest on the opposite side. I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started. “Shall we go in?” she asked. “We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought.” I thought. More than a minute passed. “All right. Come on.” “Was I on that train?” “You certainly were.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Dr. Steven Pearlmutter walked in at five—all apologies and sweaty palms. From then on our life was in the hands of the doctors and their smug little categories. My husband, Brian, Dr. Pearlmutter assured me, was “a very sick young man.” He was going to “try to help him.” He began by trying to give him a shot of Thorazine—at which point Brian bolted and ran down the back stairs (all thirteen floors) and into Riverside Park. The doctor and I chased him, found him, stopped him, cajoled him, watched him bolt again, chased him again, cajoled him again and so on. The rest of the details are as sordid as they are common. From then on hospitalization became inevitable. Brian was now completely panicked and his delusions became more and more colorful. The days that followed were nightmarish. Brian’s parents flew in from California and promptly declared that Brian was perfectly OK but that I was crazy. They tried to prevent him from taking any medication and they constantly made fun of the doctors (which, admittedly, wasn’t very hard to do). They urged him to leave me and come home to California—as if being away from me would automatically make him all better. Dr. Pearlmutter had referred Brian to a psychiatrist who tried for five gallant days to keep him out of the hospital. It was no use. Between Brian’s mother and father, Brian’s boss, the Miracle Foam people, Brian’s well-meaning former professors and the doctors, our lives were no longer our own. Brian was hounded by his would-be caretakers and each day he flipped out more. On the fifth morning after Dr. Pearlmutter’s visit, Brian took all his clothes off near Belvedere Tower in Central Park. Then he tried to climb on King Jagiello’s bronze horse along with bronze King Jagiello (crossed swords and all). The police finally took him to the psycho ward at Mount Sinai (sirens screaming, Thorazine flowing like wine), and except for a few weekend passes, we never lived together again. It took another eight months or so for our marriage to sputter out completely. After Brian got to Mount Sinai, his parents moved in with me, denounced me day and night, went to the hospital with me every evening, and never allowed us more than ten minutes alone together. Visiting hour was only from six to seven anyway, and they were determined to keep us apart even then. Besides, when I was alone with Brian, all he did was attack me. I was a Judas, he said. How could I have locked him up? Didn’t I know that I would go to the Seventh Circle—the circle of the traitors? Didn’t I know that mine was the lowest crime in Dante’s book? Didn’t I know I was already in hell?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.” “But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.” “Brian was crazy.” “Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.” “I guess…” “Look—why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?” “Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?” “You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends….” Drab, drab, drab, I thought. “All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.” “You lose,” Adrian said. “I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever change anything?” Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down). “In the mornings,” Adrian finally said, “I never can remember your name.” So that was my answer. It went through me like a knife. And there I was lying awake every night next to him trembling and saying my own name over and over to myself to try to remember who I was. — “The trouble with existentialism is” (I said this as we were driving down the autostrada) “that you can’t stop thinking about the future. Actions do have consequences.” “I can stop thinking about the future,” Adrian said. “How?” He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. I feel glorious today, for example.” “Why do I feel so lousy when you feel so glorious?” “Because you’re bloody Jewish,” he laughed. “The Chosen People. You may be mediocre at other things, but at suffering you’re always superb.” “Bastard.” “Why? Just because I tell you the truth? Look—you want love, you want intensity, you want feeling, you want closeness—and what do you settle for? Suffering. At least your suffering is intense…. The patient loves her disease. She doesn’t want to be cured.” —

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “I don’t know.” “You don’t even have the guts to stay with him. If you’re in love with him—why don’t you commit yourself to it and meet his kids and go to London. But you can’t even do that. You don’t know what you want.” He paused. “We ought to go home right now.” “What’s the use? You’ll never trust me again. I’ve ruined it. It’s hopeless.” And I think I really believed it. “Maybe if we go home and you go right back into analysis, if you understand why you did this, if you work it through, maybe we can salvage our marriage.” “If I go back into analysis! Is that the condition?” “Not for my sake—but for yours. So you won’t be doing this sort of thing forever.” “Have I ever done it before? Have I? Even when you were horrible to me, even that time in Paris when you wouldn’t speak to me, even those years in Germany when I was so unhappy, when I needed someone to turn to, when I felt so lonely and shut out by you and your constant depression—I never got involved with anyone else. Never. You certainly provoked me then. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to me. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to a writer. You used to say you had no empathy for my problems. You never said you loved me. And when I cried and felt miserable because all I wanted was closeness and affection you sent me to an analyst. You used the analyst as a substitute for everything. Whenever any kind of closeness threatened, you sent me to a goddamned analyst.” “Where the hell would you be now without the analyst? You’d still be rewriting one poem over and over. You’d still be unable to send work anywhere. You’d still be terrified of everything. When I met you, you were running around like a lunatic, never working steadily at anything, full of a million plans that never got finished. I gave you a place to work, encouraged you when you hated yourself, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, paid for your goddamned analyst so you could grow and develop as a human being instead of floundering around with all the other members of your crazy family. Go blame me for all your problems. I was the only one who ever gave you support and encouragement and this is all you can do in return—go running after some asshole Englishman and whining to me about not knowing what you want. Go to hell! Follow him wherever you want, I’m going back to New York.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Be kind to your behind.” “Blush like you mean it.” “Love your hair.” “Want a better body? We’ll rearrange the one you’ve got.” “That shine on your face should come from him, not from your skin.” “You’ve come a long way, baby.” “How to score with every male in the zodiac.” “The stars and sensual you.” “To a man they say Cutty Sark.” “A diamond is forever.” “If you’re concerned about douching…” “Length and coolness come together.” “How I solved my intimate odor problem.” “Lady be cool.” “Every woman alive loves Chanel No. 5.” “What makes a shy girl get intimate?” “Femme, we named it after you.” What all the ads and all the whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever. And the crazy part of it was that even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career—you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in. It didn’t matter, you see, whether you had an IQ of 170 or an IQ of 70, you were brainwashed all the same. Only the surface trappings were different. Only the talk was a little more sophisticated. Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silks and satins, and of course, money. Nobody bothered to tell you what marriage was really about. You weren’t even provided, like European girls, with a philosophy of cynicism and practicality. You expected not to desire any other men after marriage. And you expected your husband not to desire any other women. Then the desires came and you were thrown into a panic of self-hatred. What an evil woman you were! How could you keep being infatuated with strange men? How could you study their bulging trousers like that? How could you sit at a meeting imagining how every man in the room would screw? How could you sit on a train fucking total strangers with your eyes? How could you do that to your husband? Did anyone ever tell you that maybe it had nothing whatever to do with your husband?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute. (The girls in my high school actually used to repeat this piously to each other. God only knows where we got it. It was the received wisdom, and like robots, we passed it on.) There are two kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. One is “mature” (i.e. good). The other is “immature” (i.e. evil). One is “normal” (i.e. good). The other is “neurotic” (i.e. evil). This pseudohip, pseudopsychological moral code was more Calvinistic than Calvinism. C. Men reach their sexual peak at sixteen and decline thereafter….Brian was twenty-four. No doubt he was over the hill. Eight years over the hill. If he only fucked me once a month at twenty-four—imagine how little he’d fuck me at thirty-four! It was terrifying to contemplate. Maybe even the sex wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been an indication of all the other things wrong with our marriage. We never saw each other. He stayed in the office until seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve at night. I kept house and moldered away in the library over my eighteenth-century sexual slang. The ideal bourgeois marriage. Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married. Things went on like this for several months. I got increasingly depressed. I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I was usually comatose until noon. I started cutting nearly all my classes, except the holy of holies: the Proseminar. Graduate school seemed ridiculous to me. I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. You were supposed to keep all the names of the professors and all the theories straight so that you could pass exams on them. Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading Tom Jones as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. All the books of criticism had names like The Rhetoric of Laughter or The Comic Determinants of Henry Fielding’s Fiction or Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire. Fielding would have been rolling over in his grave. My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  This novel’s importance for the Stonewall-era gay forces rested largely in its view that sexual exploration can be an absolute good. Set before the hideously corrective advent of AIDS, the book’s youthful exploratory sexuality is here seen as a valid “occupation,” almost an art form. It is not considered simply the naughty, harshly judged “preoccupation” that America’s prevailing culture found so pathological in gay men’s enviable (and therefore troubling) multiple partners. But what the Movement seems to have missed, what makes reencountering this work such a tonic pleasure now that the fever heat of its political application has abated, is the far-ranging detachment of the sprightly invert-convert at its center. The analytic couch mentioned above is being approached by a boy most eager for the fastest possible “cure.” The whole motor of this refreshingly non-politically correct work is the heterosexual escape fantasy of a child who’s terminally gay in his every molecule and synapse. The latent heterosexual. Very latent. I do wish White had given his alluring-repellent narrator a proper name. I suspect his young narrator would, by now, have entered the national lexicon, an alternative roomie-companion to poor straight Holden Caulfield. The anonymous hero acts out his desire to be more than merely gay—carries it clear through to the book’s strange yet somehow inevitable Gethsemane ending. The Liberationists, in their joy at the forthrightness of the book’s sex—thrilling for its time and still startling in its full-frontal geometry and detail—overlooked how our boy protagonist’s most fervent wish is always for Grosse Pointe normalcy. Such longed-for blandness, even if it’s kinky as his father’s brand, might seem a gross and pointless death wish. But that’s precisely what the lad wants. He longs to remain in the country club’s cozy dining room. He dreads being banished to a dishwashers’ underworld that might constitute his sole means of support, his enforced self-disgusted subject matter. That could not be made plainer than in the following sustained analogy: I had a dream in which I was a waiter in an elegant restaurant where I served happy, elegant couples. That was upstairs. Downstairs the filthy kitchen was staffed by bald, grizzled men, convicts, really, mute, bestial with grief. They wore bloodstained aprons and gleamed with sweat. I was one of them and, although I could rise to circulate among the happy diners, I always had to descend back down to the hopeless workers, each suspicious of the others. And then the police van arrived and the help, all of us, were dragged out into the night street ablaze with revolving red lights. We were hauled off to prison, where we’d remain forever.… Now [the diners] knew I wasn’t one of them but one of the convicts. I woke with tears in my eyes … IV On publication of this work, The New York Times announced—jingoistically perhaps, but with a certain aptness—“Edmund White has crossed J.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  23A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where, to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been scheduled to appear for the first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along which the fiend’s spoor should be sought; and to this I devoted myself, after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone. Imagine me, reader, with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme il faut, imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the hotel register: “Oh,” I would say, “I am almost positive that I stayed here once—let me look up the entries for mid-June—no, I see I’m wrong after all—what a very quaint name for a home town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much.” Or: “I had a customer staying her—I mislaid his address—may I …?” And every once in a while, especially if the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male, personal inspection of the books was denied me. I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk—but that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else—he was quite capable of that—he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I only know I was quite certain she had left me for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe. The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 A.M. mountain time. The street was Main Street. I paced its blue side peering at the opposite one: charming it into beauty, was one of those fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were, through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Cafe, Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, Western Union, Cleaners, Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a detective; in love with a blackmailer. Took advantage of my utter helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in the parked car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious sarcasm—un ricanement—that I was crazy to suspect her, that she would turn up in a minute. She did. I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve with a timid and imbecile smile. “Get into the car,” I said. She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her duplicity. Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I became aware she was telling me that she had met a former girl friend. “Yes? Whom?” “A Beardsley girl.” “Good. I know every name in your group. Alice Adams?” “This girl was not in my group.” “Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please.” “She was not in my school. She is just a town girl in Beardsley.” “Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look up all the Browns.” “I only know her first name.” “Mary or Jane?” “No—Dolly, like me.” “So that’s the dead end” (the mirror you break your nose against). “Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?” “We went to a drugstore.” “And you had there—?” “Oh, just a couple of Cokes.” “Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.” “At least, she had. I had a glass of water.” “Good.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jack opened his door and not for the first time marvelled at Lydia’s precision. ‘Ah, Claire .’ ‘Hey, Jack. I’m just rushing to class.’ ‘How are you ?’ ‘Well!’ said Claire, pushing the sunglasses she had taken to wearing up on to her head. She was never too late to talk a little of how she was. ‘The war continues, the President’s an ass, our poets are failing to legislate, the world’s going to hell and I want to move to New Zealand – you know? And I’ve got a class in five. The usual!’ ‘These are dark times,’ said Jack solemnly, threading his fingers through each other like a parson. ‘And yet what can the university do, Claire, but continue its work? Doesn’t one have to believe that at times like these the university joins arms with the fourth estate, exercising our capacity for advocacy . . . helping frame political issues . . . that we too sit in that ‘‘reporters’ gallery yonder’’ . . .’ Even by Jack’s standards this was a circuitous route to get to what he intended to say. He seemed a little surprised himself by  On Beauty the development, and stood opposite Claire, with a face suggestive of a continuation of this thought which never materialized. ‘Jack, I wish I had your confidence. We had an anti-war rally last Tuesday in Frost Hall? A hundred kids. Ellie Reinhold told me the Wellington anti-Vietnam rally in ’ brought three thousand people to the yard, and Allen Ginsberg. I’m kind of in despair at the moment. People round here act more like the first estate than the fourth if you ask me. God, Jack – I’m late, I gotta run. But maybe lunch?’ She turned to go but Jack couldn’t let her. ‘What’s on the menu, creatively speaking, this morning?’ he said, nodding at the book she held to her chest. ‘Oh! You mean what are we reading? As it happens – me!’ She flipped the thin book over to its cover, a large photo of Claire, circa . Jack, who had some taste in women, admired once again the Claire Malcolm he had first met, all those years ago. Awful pretty with those provocative schoolgirl’s bangs running into light brown waves of sumptuous hair, which curved over her left eye like Veronica Lake’s and continued all the way down to her miniature hips. For the life of him Jack could never figure out why women of a certain age cut off all their hair like that. ‘God, I look so ridiculous! But I just wanted to copy a poem for class, just an example of something. A pantoum.’ Jack brought his hand to his chin. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to freshen my memory as to the precise nature of a pantoum . . . I’m rather rusty on my Old French verse forms . . .’ ‘It’s Malay originally.’ ‘Malay!’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I saw Lolita’s eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father was having a fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony of gin. And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor believed). 22The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pinelog kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all—well, really … After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain—and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call … But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very eve of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap—two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro deserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever—and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room—all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that “snow” and “joy juice”). My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling plotting sky. “My Carmen,” I said (I used to call her that sometimes), “we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed.” “Incidentally, I want all my clothes,” said the gitanilla, humping up her knees and turning to another page. “... Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.” “There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita. I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush of the room, to identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly sounded somewhere in the passage. I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However—likewise for reasons of show—regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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. I saw Lolita’s eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father was having a fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony of gin. And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor believed). 22 The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pinelog kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all—well, really ... After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain—and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call ... But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very eve of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap—two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro deserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait. I slept. I think I actually fell asleep with my face pressed to my spiral notebook. I remember waking up in the blue hours of early morning and feeling a spiral welt on the side of my cheek. Then I pushed away the notebook and went back to sleep. And my dreams were extravagant. Full of elevators, platforms in space, enormously steep and slippery staircases, ziggurat temples I had to climb, mountains, towers, ruins…. I had some vague sense that I was assigning myself dreams as a sort of cure. I remember once or twice waking and then falling back to sleep thinking: “Now I will have the dream which makes my decision for me.” But what was the decision I sought? Every choice seemed so unsatisfactory in one way or another. Every choice excluded some other choice. It was as if I were asking my dreams to tell me who I was and what I ought to do. I would wake with my heart pounding and then sink back to sleep again. Maybe I was hoping I’d wake up somebody else. Fragments of those dreams are still with me. In one of them, I had to walk a narrow plank between two skyscrapers in order to save someone’s life. Whose? Mine? Bennett’s? Chloe’s? The dream did not say. But it was clear that if I failed, my own life would be over. In another, I reached inside myself to take out my diaphragm, and there, floating over my cervix, was a large contact lens. Womb with a view. The cervix was really an eye. And a nearsighted eye at that. Then I remember the dream in which I was back in college preparing to receive my degree from Millicent McIntosh. I walked up a long flight of steps which looked more like the steps of a Mexican temple than the steps of Low Library. I teetered on very high heels and worried about tripping over my gown. As I approached the lectern and Mrs. McIntosh held out a scroll to me, I realized that I was not merely graduating but was to receive some special honor. “I must tell you that the faculty does not approve of this,” Mrs. McIntosh said. And I knew then that the fellowship conferred on me the right to have three husbands simultaneously. They sat in the audience wearing black caps and gowns. Bennett, Adrian, and some other man whose face was not clear. They were all waiting to applaud when I got my diploma. “Only your high academic achievement makes it impossible for us to withhold this honor,” Mrs. McIntosh said, “but the faculty hopes you will decline of your own volition.” “But why?” I protested. “Why can’t I have all three?”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I felt a strong affinity to this curiously life-hating religion that teaches us we have no soul and that the self is merely a baggage depot where random parcels have been checked (labeled emotions, sensations, memories and so on) soon enough to be collected by different owners, an emptying out that will leave the room blissfully vacant. That emptiness, that annihilation is what the Christian most dreads but the Buddhist most earnestly craves—or would if craving itself were not precisely what must be extirpated. Desire—hankering after sex, money, fame, security—ties us to the world and condemns us to rebirth, “the cycle of rebirth” I pictured as a wheel on which the sinner was stretched and bound, the wheel that crushed him as it turned but cruelly failed to kill him. I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero. My mother discovered a Buddhist church some thirty miles away. She gamely drove me down to it one Sunday ( Sunday! I mentally sniffed, already the ascetic snob; Church! I exclaimed, an Oriental purist). On the preceding Saturday night I dreamed of opening wicker gates, the process shot as the wizened abbot walks toward me on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast against a rear projection of a retreating, expanding universe of thickening blue sandalwood incense and swaying, saffron-robed monks. Instead I encountered a congregation of grinning Japanese families in a former Baptist church and heard announcements of the Young Buddhists Association’s annual picnic and basketball practice as well as disappointingly melodic hymns with words such as “Dearest Amida, Your Light Is Shining Through the Gloomy World of Sin” sung by us all to a wheezing organ accompaniment, then a tedious sermon on the evils of adultery. I fled, red-cheeked and offended, my puzzled mother reluctantly following me (“But I liked it, dear. It seemed so Christian, though of course they were much better dressed than your average Christian”). I desperately needed a new beginning. The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it—unless I could change it completely. If my homosexuality was due to a surfeit of female company at home (for so ran the most popular psychological theory of the day), then I should correct the imbalance by entering an all-male world. In order to become a heterosexual I decided I should attend a boys’ boarding school (for so ran my wonderfully logical addendum to the theory).

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Men and women, women and men. It will never work, I thought. Back in the days when men were hunters and chest-beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid…. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild—and what happened? The men wilted. It was hopeless. I had desired Adrian as I had never desired anyone before in my life, and the very intensity of my need canceled out his. The more I showed my passion, the cooler he became. The more I risked to be with him, the less he was willing to risk to be with me. Was it really that simple? Did it all come down to what my mother had told me years ago about “playing hard to get"? It did seem to be true that the men who had loved me hardest were the ones I was most casual about. But what was the fun of that? What was the point? Couldn’t you ever bring philos and eros together, at least for a little while? What was the point of this constant round of alternating losses, this constant cycle of desire and indifference, indifference and desire? I had to find a hotel. It was late and dark and my suitcase was not only a great encumbrance, but it increased my air of availability. I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone—the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I’ll be back in one minute,’ murmured Monty, turning to go, but just then there was a loud noise in the house and the sound of someone charging up the hallway. The someone stopped at the library’s open door. A young black girl. She had been crying. Her face was full of rage, but now, with a start, she spotted Kiki. Surprise supplanted anger on her features. ‘Chantelle, this is – ’ said Monty. ‘Can I get out? I’m leaving,’ she said and walked on. ‘If you wish to do that,’ said Monty calmly, and followed her a few steps. ‘We’ll continue our discussion at lunchtime. One o’clock in my office.’ Kiki heard the front door slam. Monty stayed where he was for a moment and then turned back to his guest. ‘I’m sorry about that.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘ I’m sorry,’ said Kiki, looking at the rug beneath her feet. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’ ‘A student . . . well, actually that is the question,’ said Monty, walking across the room and taking the white armchair by the window. Kiki realized she had never really seen him like this, sitting down, in a normal, domestic setting. ‘Yes, I think I met her before – she knows my daughter.’ Monty sighed. ‘Unreal expectations,’ he said, looking at the ceiling and then at Kiki. ‘ Why do we give these young people unreal expectations? What good can come from it?’ ‘Sorry, I don’t . . . ?’ said Kiki. ‘Here is a young African-American lady,’ explained Monty, bringing his signet-ringed right hand down solidly on the arm of the Victorian chair, ‘who has no college education and no college experience, who did not graduate from her high school , who yet believes that somehow the academic world of Wellington owes her a place within its hallowed walls – and why? As restitution for her own – or her family’s – misfortunes. Actually, the problem is larger than that. These children are being encouraged to claim reparation for history itself . They are being used as political pawns – they are being fed lies. It depresses me terribly.’ It was strange being spoken to like this, as if in an audience of one. Kiki wasn’t sure how to reply. ‘I don’t think I . . . what was it she wanted from you, exactly?’ ‘In the simplest terms: she wants to continue taking a Wellington class for which she does not pay and for which she is entirely unqualified. She wants this because she is black and poor. What a demoralizing philosophy! What message do we give to our children when we tell them that they are not fit for the same meritocracy as their white counterparts?’ In the silence that followed this rhetorical question, Monty sighed again.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyes—of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumed, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore, was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas—que sais-je!—or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike block there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 A.M., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] IN THAT PART of the youthful year, when the Sun tempers his locks beneath Aquarius, and the nights already wane towards half the day,1 when the hoar-frost2 copies his white sister’s image on the ground, but short while lasts the temper of his pen, the peasant, whose fodder fails, rises, and looks, and sees the fields all white; whereat he smites his thigh, goes back into the house, and to and fro laments like a poor wight who knows not what to do; then comes out again, and recovers hope, observing how the world has changed its face in little time; and takes his staff, and chases forth his lambs to feed: thus the Master made me despond, when I saw his brow so troubled; and thus quickly to the sore the plaster came. For when we reached the shattered bridge, my Guide turned to me with that sweet aspect which I saw first at the toot of the mountain. He opened his arms after having chosen some plan within himself, first looking well at the ruin, and took hold of me And as one who works, and calculates, always seeming to provide beforehand: so, lifting me up towards the top of one big block, he looked out another splinter, saying: “Now clamber over that, but try first if it will carry thee.” It was no way for one clad with cloak of lead: for scarcely we, he light and I pushed on, could mount up from jag to jag. And were it not on that precinct the ascent was shorter than on the other, I know not about him, but I certainly had been defeated. But as Malebolge all hangs towards the entrance of the lowest well, the site of every valley imports that one side rises and the other descends; we, however, came at length to the point from which the last stone breaks off. The breath was so exhausted from my lungs, when I was up, that I could no farther; nay, seated me at my first arrival. “Now it behoves thee thus to free thyself from sloth,” said the Master: “for sitting on down, or under coverlet, men come not into fame; without which whoso consumes his life, leaves such vestige of himself on earth, as smoke in air or foam in water; and therefore rise! conquer thy panting with the soul, that conquers every battle, if with its heavy body it sinks not down. A longer ladder must be climbed: to have quitted these is not enough; if thou understandest me, now act so that it may profit thee.” I then rose, showing myself better furnished with breath than I felt, and said: “Go on; for I am strong and confident.” We took our way up the cliff, which was rugged, narrow, and difficult, and greatly steeper than the former. Speaking I went, that I might not seem faint; whereat a voice came from the other fosse, unsuitable for forming words.