Guilt

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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity. Why? She licked a finger and leafed slowly through the pages in my folder, too slowly. Maddening. “The blind leading the blind,” she said wistfully. “The expression has been misused for centuries. It isn’t about ignorance at all. It’s about intuition—the sixth sense, which is the psychic sense. How else could the blind lead? The answer to this question has more to do with science than you might think. Ever seen doctors try to revive someone whose heart has stopped? People don’t understand electroshock. It’s not like sitting in the electric chair. The shocker. Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.” “I don’t know. I always forget them. And I’m not sleeping at all, I don’t think.” “We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?” “Yes.” “Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?” “I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.” “A family friend?” “She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg? “And how did your mother die? Was it sudden? Was it violent?” I had answered this question half a dozen times by now. “I killed her,” I said then. Dr. Tuttle smirked and adjusted her glasses. “How did you achieve that, metaphorically speaking?” I racked my mind. “I crushed oxycodone into her vodka.” “That would do it,” Dr. Tuttle said, scribbling maniacally with a ballpoint pen to get the ink flowing. I couldn’t watch. Dr. Tuttle had never been so irritating. I closed my eyes. It was true that my father had kept a white marble mortar and pestle in his study—an antique. I tried to imagine taking a leftover bottle of his oxycodone and crushing the pills in there. I could see my hands grinding, then spooning the white powder into one of my mother’s frosty bottles of Belvedere. I swirled it around. “Now sit still for a minute,” Dr. Tuttle said, dismissing my confession. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to assess your personality shift. I notice today that your face is slightly off center. Has anyone pointed that out to you?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily—especially Reuben Finkel, a redheaded, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars. “Hello, Reuben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Bennett said nothing. He walked on ahead as if in a trance. Adrian followed him. It momentarily occurred to me that perhaps something more had happened between the two men during the night, but I quickly put it out of my mind. Why? — Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Bennett stiffly refused. But then when we were unable to get a taxi, Bennett finally gave in—without even the courtesy of a word or a nod in Adrian’s direction. Adrian shrugged and took the wheel. I doubled myself up in the midget-sized backseat. This time Bennett directed and we did not get lost. But throughout the whole ride, there was a terrible silence between us, except for the directions Bennett offered. I wanted to talk. We had been through something important together and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. This might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us, but instead Bennett was hell-bent on denying it. Adrian wasn’t much help either. All their talk about analysis and self-analysis was pure bullshit. Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless. They both faced straight ahead like Siamese twins joined at a crucial but invisible spot on the side of the neck. Blood brothers. And I the sister who had loused them up. The woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box. NINEPandora’s Box or My Two Mothers A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing. —Anne Sexton Of course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Studies also show that dogs use different growls and barks to communicate with each other, although they might just be communicating arousal (affect) in the acoustic signal. One study even shows that a dog named Sofia, like our chimp friends, could be trained to press symbols on a keyboard to communicate a few basic concepts: a walk, toy, water, play, food, and her crate. 35 Clearly, dogs have something nontrivial going on upstairs, but even so, scientists have no indication yet that dogs have emotion concepts. In fact, there’s pretty good evidence that they don’t, though many dog behaviors look emotional. Dog owners, for example, infer guilt when they believe their dog is hiding something (for example, avoiding eye contact) or is being submissive (such as drooping the ears, lying down and showing the belly, or holding the tail low). But do dogs have a concept of guilt? A clever study investigated this question. In each trial, a dog owner offered his or her dog a desirable biscuit, then explicitly instructed the dog not to eat it and promptly left the room. Unbeknownst to the owner, however, an experimenter then entered the room and influenced the dog’s behavior, either handing the treat to the dog (who ate it) or removing the treat from the room. Afterward, the experimenter either told the owner the truth or lied. Half the owners were told that their dog had obeyed and to greet their dog in a warm and friendly manner; the rest heard that the dog had eaten the biscuit and should be scolded. This created four different scenarios: obedient dog with a friendly owner, obedient dog being scolded, disobedient dog with a friendly owner, and disobedient dog being scolded. What happened? The scolded dogs performed more behaviors that people perceive as stereotypically guilty, regardless of whether or not the dogs had disobeyed. This is evidence that dogs were not experiencing guilt at performing a forbidden act; rather, their owners were perceiving guilt when they believed the dog had eaten the biscuit. 36 Another study looked at jealousy in dogs, asking owners to interact with a toy dog while the real dog watched. The toy barked, whined, and wagged its tail. The study found that dogs in this situation would snap, whine, push at the owner and the toy, and insert themselves between the owner and the toy, more often than when the owner interacted with a different toy (a jack-o-lantern) or read a book. The authors interpreted these findings to mean that the dogs were jealous, particularly because many of the dogs tested sniffed the anus of the toy dog. Unfortunately, the experimenters did not test to see if the owners were behaving differently in the three conditions (toy dog, jack-o-lantern, and reading) in any way that could account for the dogs’ behavior.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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? And what about those other longings which marriage stifled? Those longings to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad; to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something (like the back two legs of a horse outfit on the vaudeville stage). Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Itchy for sex and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory—and that made things even worse. I knew my itches were un-American—and that made things still worse. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man—especially if he is a “glamorous bachelor” who “dates starlets” during a brief interval between marriages. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice. And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I stared into my eyes, white-circled from having worn sunglasses for weeks. Why was it I could never decide what color my eyes were? Was that significant? Was that somehow at the root of my problem? Grayish blue with yellow flecks. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Slate blue, Brian used to say, and your hair is the color of wheat. “Wheaty hair,” he called it, stroking it. Brian had the brownest eyes I’d ever seen—eyes like a Byzantine saint in a mosaic. When he was cracking up he used to stare at his eyes in the mirror for hours. He would turn the light on and off like a child, trying to catch his pupils suddenly dilating. He spoke literally then of a looking-glass world, a world of antimatter into which he could pass. His eyes were the key to that world. He believed that his soul could be sucked out through his pupils like albumen being sucked from a pierced egg. I remembered how attracted I was to Brian’s craziness, how fascinated I was with his imagery. In those days I was not writing surrealist poems but rather conventional, descriptive poems with lots of overly clever wordplay. But later, when I began to delve deeper and allow my imagination freer rein, I often felt I was seeing the world through Brian’s eyes and that his madness was the source of my inspiration. I felt as if I had gone crazy with him and come back up. We had been that close. And if I felt guilty, it was because I was able to go down and climb up again, whereas he was trapped. As if I were Dante and he were Ugolino (one of his favorite characters from the Inferno) and I could return from hell and relate his story, write the poetry I had culled from his madness, while he was utterly overwhelmed by it. You suck everyone dry, I accused myself; you use everyone. Everyone uses everyone, I answered.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of “guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything.” Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confession,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,” and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,” which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it. Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty, who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque. For a while Humbert is certain that his “shadow” and nemesis is his Swiss cousin, Detective Trapp, and when Lolita agrees and says, “Perhaps he is Trapp,” she is summarizing Quilty’s role in the novel. Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate. Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psychological Double; “Lo was playing a double game,” says Humbert punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Doppelgänger parody, and the function of parody as game. The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov, from the early thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark (where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on through Bend Sinister, the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, which offers a monumental doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most intricate and profound of all Doppelgänger novels, written at precisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been exhausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lolita, which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another literary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was now worn to a thread” (Sebastian Knight, p. 91).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The boyish qualities of a nymphet tempt the reader into interpreting Humbert’s quest as essentially homosexual, but we may be less absolute in our judgment and practice of pop psychoanalysis when Humbert tells how during one of his incarcerations he trifled with psychiatrists, “teasing them with fake ‘primal scenes.’ ” “By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me ‘potentially homosexual’ .” If the clinical-minded have accepted Humbert’s explanation of the adolescent “trauma” which accounts for his pedophilia—interrupted coitus—then they should feel the force of the attack and their own form of loss when Lolita must leave Quilty’s play “a week before its natural climax.” Humbert’s “trauma” affords a further trap for the clinical mind, for the incident seems to be a sly fictive transmutation of Nabokov’s own considerably more innocent childhood infatuation with Colette (Chapter Seven, Speak, Memory); and such hints as the butterfly and the Carmen allusions shared by that chapter and Lolita only reinforce the more obvious similarities. When earnest readers, nurtured on the “standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket”, leap to make the association between the two episodes—as several have done—and immediately conclude that Lolita is autobiographical in the most literal sense, then the trap has been sprung: their wantonly reductive gesture justifies the need for just such a parody as Nabokov’s. With a cold literary perversity, Nabokov has demonstrated the falseness of their “truth”; the implications are considerable. Even the exe-getic act of searching for the “meaning” of Lolita by trying to unfold the butterfly pattern becomes a parody of the expectations of the most sophisticated reader, who finds he is chasing a mocking inversion of the “normal” Freudian direction of symbols which, once identified, may still remain mysterious, explain very little, or, like the game of Word Golf in Pale Fire, reveal nothing. Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of “guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything.” Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confession,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,” and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,” which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it. Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty, who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  As if I were Dante and he were Ugolino (one of his favorite characters from the Inferno ) and I could return from hell and relate his story, write the poetry I had culled from his madness, while he was utterly overwhelmed by it. You suck everyone dry , I accused myself; you use everyone. Everyone uses everyone , I answered. I remembered how dreadful I had felt about breaking up my marriage to Brian and it occurred to me that I had felt I deserved to spend the rest of my life immersed in his madness. My parents and Brian’s parents and the doctors had bullied me out of it. You’re only twenty-two , Brian’s psychiatrist had said; you can’t throw away your life. And I had fought him. I had accused him of betraying us both, of betraying our love. The fact was that I might easily have stayed with Brian if money and parental protestations hadn’t intervened. I felt I belonged with him. I felt I deserved to lose my life that way. I never suspected I had a life of my own at that point, and I was never good at leaving people, no matter how badly they treated me. Something in me always insisted on giving them another chance. Or perhaps it was cowardice. A kind of paralysis of the will. I stayed and wrote out my anger instead of acting on it. Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action, and even there it had been partly because of Adrian and the wild sexual obsession I had felt for him. Obviously it was dangerous to stare at your eyes in mirrors too long. I stood back to examine my body. Where did my body end and the air around it begin? Somewhere in an article on body image I had read that at times of stress—or ecstasy—we lose the boundaries of our bodies. We forget we own them. It was a sensation I often had and I recognized it as a significant part of my panics. Constant pain could do it, too. My broken leg had made me lose touch with the boundaries of my body. It was a paradox: great bodily pain or great bodily pleasure made you feel you were slipping out of your body. I tried to examine my physical self, to take stock so that I could remember who I was—if indeed my body could be said to be me. I remembered a story about Theodore Roethke alone in his big old house, dressing and undressing himself before the mirror, examining his nakedness in between bouts of composition. Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but it had the ring of truth for me. One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand. Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I had never been able to make peace between the two halves of myself. All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expense of the other. I had never been happy with the bourgeois virtues of marriage, stability, and work above pleasure. I was too curious and adventurous not to chafe under those restrictions. But I also suffered from night terrors and attacks of panic at being alone. So I always wound up living with somebody or being married. Besides I really believed in pursuing a longstanding and deep relationship with one person. I could easily see the sterility of hopping from bed to bed and having shallow affairs with lots of shallow people. I had had the unutterably dismal experience of waking up in bed with a man I couldn’t bear to talk to—and that was certainly no liberation either. But still, there just didn’t seem to be any way to get the best of both exuberance and stability into your life. The fact that greater minds than mine had pondered these issues and come up with no very clear answers didn’t comfort me much either. It only made me feel that my concerns were banal and commonplace. If I were really an exceptional person, I thought, I wouldn’t spend hours worrying my head about marriage and adultery. I would just go out and snatch life with both hands and feel no remorse or guilt for anything. My guilt only showed how thoroughly bourgeois and contemptible I was. All my worrying this sad old bone only showed my ordinariness. — That evening the festivities began with a candidates’ party at a café in Grinzing. It was a highly inelegant affair. Great phallic knockwursts and sauerkraut were the Freudian main course. For entertainment the Viennese analytic candidates, who were hosting the party, sang choruses of “When the Analysts Come Marching In...” (to the tune of “When the Saints...”). The lyrics were in English, presumably—or at least in some language a Viennese candidate might regard as English. Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere. Bennett was discussing training with another candidate from the London Institute and I eventually struck up a conversation with the guy across from me, a Chilean psychoanalyst studying in London. All I could think of when he said he was from Chile was Neruda. So we discussed Neruda. I got myself worked up into one of my enthusiastic snow jobs and told him how lucky he was to be South American at a time when all the greatest living writers were South American. I was thinking what a total fraud I was, but he was pleased. As if I’d really complimented him.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  (And shouldn’t she know? She’d married three of them.) They had no idea what the hell they were doing. Howard had no way of dealing with his new reality. He was unequal to the task of squaring his sense of himself with what he had done. It was not rational, and therefore, he could not comprehend it. For Claire, their affair was only confirmation of what she knew of the darkest parts of herself. For Howard, it was clearly revelation. It was horrendous thinking about him, having him refracted through Zora’s features. Now that Claire’s part in Howard’s indiscretion was no longer a secret, the guilt had moved from private indulgence to public punishment. Not that she minded the shame; she had been the mistress on other occasions and had not been especially cowed by it then. But this time it was infuriating and humiliating to be punished for something she’d done with so little desire or will. She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psychological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself. And were they still like that, she wondered – these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of – as Howard might put it – desiring subjects? Thinking of the girls sat cross-legged with her in this basement, of Zora in front of her, of the angry girls who shouted their poetry from the stage – no, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to  the anatomy lesson everybody about everything. Strangely, Kiki Belsey had always struck Claire as a wonderful anomaly in exactly this sense. Claire remembered when Howard first met his wife, back when Kiki was a nursing student in New York. At that time her beauty was awesome, almost unspeakable, but more than this she radiated an essential female nature Claire had already imagined in her poetry – natural, honest, powerful, unmediated, full of something like genuine desire. A goddess of the everyday. She was not one of Howard’s intellectual set, but she was actively political, and her beliefs were genuine and well expressed. Womanish , as they said back then, not feminine . For Claire, Kiki was not only evidence of Howard’s humanity but proof that a new kind of woman had come into the world as promised, as advertised.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was the same, unopened condom at which Claire had laughed, that afternoon of their second assignation, when Howard had produced it, like an anxious, well-intentioned teenage boy (‘Howard, darling – that’s sweet of you, but my reproductive days are over’). Upon hearing his retelling of it, Claire had wanted to laugh again – it was so typically Howard, such an unnecessary disaster. But what followed was not so funny. He told her that he had confessed, telling Kiki the minimum that needed to be told – that he had been unfaithful. He had not mentioned Claire’s name. This was kind, and Claire thanked him for it. He looked at her oddly. He had told this lie to save his wife’s feelings, not Claire’s face. He finished his short, factual speech. He wobbled a little on his feet. This was a different Howard from the one Claire had known these thirty years. No longer the steely academic who’d always (she suspected) found her slightly ridiculous, who never seemed quite certain what the point of poetry was. That day in her office Howard had looked as if a good, comforting piece of verse was just what he needed. Throughout their friendship, Claire had satirized his scrupulous intellectualism, just as he had teased her about her artistic ideals. It was her old joke that Howard was only human in a theoretical sense. This was the general feeling in Wellington too: his students found it near impossible to imagine that Howard should have a wife, a family, that he went to the bathroom, that he felt love. Claire was not as naive as the students; she knew he did love, and intensely, but she also saw that it was not articulated in him in the normal way. Something about his academic life had changed love for him, changed its nature. Of course, without Kiki, he couldn’t function – anyone who knew him knew that much. But it was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. Claire had always  On Beauty been curious how a marriage like that worked. Dr Byford went so far as to suggest that this was exactly the reason Claire had chosen to get involved with Howard after all these years. At the moment of her own greatest emotional commitment she intervened in the most successful marriage she knew. And it was true: sitting behind her desk, examining this abandoned, rudderless man, she had felt perversely vindicated. Seeing him like that had meant she was right, after all, about academics.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I wondered, would my mother have been better off if I had stolen all her pills, as Reva had stolen all of mine? Reva was lucky to be plagued only by the image of her mother’s burning body. “Individual pans.” At least her mother’s body was ruined. It didn’t exist anymore. My dead mother was lying in a coffin, a shriveled skeleton. I still felt like she was up to something down there, bitter and suffering as the flesh on her body withered and sank away from her bones. Did she blame me? We buried her in a carnation pink Thierry Mugler suit. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick was perfect, blood red, Christian Dior 999. If I unearthed her now, would the lipstick have faded? Either way, she’d be a stiff husk, like the sloughed-off exoskeleton of a huge insect. That was what my mother was. What if I’d flushed away all those prescriptions before I went back to school, poured all her alcohol down the sink? Did she secretly want me to do that? Would that have made her happy for once? Or would it have pushed her further away? “My own daughter!” I sensed a bit of remorse in me. It smelled like pennies in the room, I thought. The air tasted like when you test a battery with your tongue. Cold and electric. “I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.” Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I was having a stroke. I wanted Xanax. I wanted Klonopin. Reva had even taken my empty bottle of chewable peppermint melatonin. How could she? In my mind, I made a list of pills I wanted to take and then I imagined taking them. I cupped my hand and plucked the invisible pills out of my palm. I swallowed them one by one. It didn’t work. I started sweating. I went back to the kitchen and drank water from the tap, then stuck my head in the freezer and found a bottle of Jose Cuervo wrapped in a crinkly white plastic bag. I was glad it wasn’t a human head. I drank the tequila and glared at Reva’s Polaroid picture. Then I remembered that I had a set of keys to her apartment. • • • I HADN’T BEEN TO the Upper West Side in several years, not since the last time I’d been over to Reva’s. It felt safe in that part of town, sobering. The buildings were heavier. The streets were wider. Nothing there had really changed since I’d graduated from Columbia. Westside Market. Riverside Park. 1020. The West End. Cheap pizza by the slice. Maybe that’s why Reva loved it, I thought. Cheap binges. Bulimia was pricey if you had fine taste. I always thought it was pathetic that Reva had chosen to stay in the area after graduation, but passing through it in the cab, in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  This young man troubled in mind at so suddaine an ill, although hee abhorred to commit so beastly a crime, yet hee would not cast her off with a present deniall, but warily pacified her mind with delay of promise. Wherefore he promised to doe all according to her desire: And in the meane season, he willed his mother to be of good cheere, and comfort her selfe till as he might find some convenient time to come unto her, when his father was ridden forth: Wherewithall hee got him away from the pestilent sight of his stepdame. And knowing that this matter touching the ruine of all the whole house needed the counsell of wise and grave persons, he went incontinently to a sage old man and declared the whole circumstance of the matter. The old man after long deliberation, thought there was no better way to avoyd the storme of cruell fortune to come, then to run away. In the meane season this wicked woman impatient of her love, and the long delay of her sonne, egged her husband to ride abroad into farre countreyes. And then she asked the young-man the accomplishment of his promise, but he to rid himselfe entirely from her hands, would find alwayes excuses, till in the end she understood by the messengers that came in and out, that he nothing regarded her. Then she by how much she loved him before, by so much and more she hated him now. And by and by she called one of her servants, ready to all mischiefes: To whom she declared all her secrets. And there it was concluded betweene them two, that the surest way was to kill the young man: Whereupon this varlet went incontinently to buy poyson, which he mingled with wine, to the intent he would give it to the young man to drinke, and thereby presently to kill him. But while they were in deliberation how they might offer it unto him, behold here happened a strange adventure. For the young sonne of the woman that came from schoole at noone (being very thirsty) tooke the pot wherein the poyson was mingled, and ignorant of the venim, dranke a good draught thereof, which was prepared to kill his brother: whereby he presently fell downe to the ground dead. His schoolemaster seeing his suddaine change, called his mother, and all the servants of the house with a lowd voyce. Incontinently every man declared his opinion, touching the death of the child: but the cruell woman the onely example of stepmothers malice, was nothing moved by the bitter death of her sonne, or by her owne conscience of paracide, or by the misfortune of her house, or by the dolour of her husband, but rather devised the destruction of all her family. For by and by shee sent a messenger after her husband to tell him the great misfortune which happened after his departure.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so- called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace, “let us get off the subject.” I then tried—also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips— to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark—and plunged into a nightmare. I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing thought that her mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road where to park in peace.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  dem, cotidie ac partes electiores surripere atque iis divenditis peculium latenter augere, de reliquis aequam vindicare divisionem. Si tibi denique societas ista displicet, possumus omnia quidem cetera fratres manere, ab isto tamen nexu com- munionis discedere : nam video in immensum damni procedentem querelam nutrire nobis immanem dis- cordiam," Subicit alius: * Laudo istam tuam me- hercules et ipse constantiam, quod cotidie furatis claneulo partibus praevenisti querimoniam, quam diutissime sustinens tacitus ingemescebam, ne viderer rapinae sordidae meum fratrem arguere. Sed bene, quod utrimquesecus sermone prolato iacturae re- medium quaeritur, ne silentio procedens simultas 15 Eteocleas nobis contentiones pariat." His et simili- bus altercati conviciis deierantur utrique nullam se prorsus fraudem, nullam denique surreptionem facti- tasse, sed plane debere cunctis artibus communis dispendii latronem inquiri: nam neque asinum, qui solus interesset, talibus cibis affici posse, et tamen cotidie partes electiles comparere nusquam, nec utique cellulam suam tam immanes involare muscas ut olim. Harpyiae fuere, quae diripiebant Phineias dapes. Interea liberalibus cenis inescatus et humanis affatim cibis saginatus, corpus obesa pinguitie comple- veram, corium arvina sueculenta molliveram, pilum 408 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X away the best meat and selling to augment thy private good, and yet nevertheless to have thy equal part of the residue that is left? If our partnership do displease thee, we will be partners and brothers in other things, but in this we will break off: for I perceive that the great loss which I sustain will at length grow from complaining to be a cause of great discord between us." Then answered the other: “Verily I praise thy great constancy and subtileness, in that thou (when thou hast secretly taken away the meat) dost begin to complain first; whereas I by long space of time have silently suffered thee, because I would not seem to accuse my brother of a scurvy theft. But I am right glad in that we are fallen into communication of this matter, to seek a remedy for it, lest by our silence like contention might arise between us as fortuned between Eteocles! and his brother." When they had reasoned and striven together in this sort, they sware both earnestly that neither of them stole or took away any jot of the meat, but that they must conclude to search out the thief by all kind of means in common. For they could not imagine or think that the ass, who stood alone there, would fancy any such meats, and yet every day the best parts thereof would utterly disappear; neither could they think that flies were so great or ravenous as to devour whole dishes of meat, like the birds harpies which carried away the meats of Phineus, king of Arcadia. In the mean season, while I was fed with dainty morsels, and fattened with food fit for men, I gathered together my flesh, my skin waxed soft and juicy, my hair began to shine, and I was gallant on every part;

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Ultimately, I said goodbye to Steve and took up masturbation, fasting, and poetry. I kept telling myself that masturbation at least kept me pure. Steve continued to woo me with bottles of Chanel No. 5, Frank Sinatra records, and beautifully lettered quotations from the poems of Yeats. He called me whenever he got drunk and on every one of my birthdays for the next five years. (Was it just jerking him off which inspired such loyalty?) But meanwhile I repented for my self-indulgence by undergoing a sort of religious conversion which included starvation (I denied myself even water), studying Siddhartha, and losing twenty pounds (and with them, my periods). I also got a Joblike rash of boils and was sent to my first dermatologist—a German lady refugee who said, memorably, “Za skeen is za meeroar of za zoul” and who referred me to the first of my many psychiatrists, a short doctor whose name was Schrift. — Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vienna with us) was a follower of Wilhelm Stekel and he tucked his shoelaces under the toes of his shoes. (I am not sure whether or not this was part of the Stekelian method.) His apartment building on Madison Avenue had very dark and narrow halls whose walls were covered with gold, seashell-spotted wallpaper, such as you might find in the bathroom of an old house in Larchmont. Waiting for the elevator, I used to stare at the wallpaper and wonder if the landlord had gotten a good deal on a bathroom wallpaper closeout. Why else paper a lobby with gold seashells and tiny pink fishes? Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head. He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother. What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery. “Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because it’s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist. Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die.” Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished.” The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. But even at our very best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we drove on: “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store”); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would improvement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl’s day?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Her most definite and also most desperate act is the burning of his letters-and the anguish this cost her, and the fact that in this burning she expr essed what surely must have seemed to her lif e's monumental failu re and waste, Gide characteris tically (indeed, one may say, necessarily) cannot enter into and cannot understand. "They were my most precious belong ings," she tells him, and perhaps he cannot be blamed for prote cting himself against the knife of this dreadful conjugal confession. But: "It is the best of me that disappears," he tells us, ((and it will no longer cotm terbalance the worst.'' (It alics mine.) He had entrusted, as it were, to her his pur ity, that part of him that was not carnal; and it is quit e clear that, though he suspected it, he could not face the fact that it was only when her purity ended that her life could begin, that the key to her liberation was in his hands. But if he had ever turned that key madness and despair would have followed for him, his world would have turned completely dark, the string connecting him to heaven would have been cut. And this is because then he could no longer have lmred Madeleine as an ideal, as Emanuele, God-with-us, but would have been compelled to love her as a woman, which he could not have done except physically. And then he would have had to hate her, and at that moment those gates which, as it seemed to him, held him back from utter corru p tion would have been opened. He loved her as a woman, indeed, only in the sense that no man could have held the 23+ NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME place in Gidc's dark sky which was held by Madeleine. She was his Heaven who would forgive him for his Hell and help him to endure it. As indeed she was and, in the strangest way possible, did-by allowing him to feel guilty about her instead of the boys on the Piazza d'Espagne-with the result that, in Gide's work, both his Heaven and his Hell suffer from a cer tain lack of ur gency. Gidc's relations with Madeleine place his relations with men in rather a bleak light. Since he clearly could not forgive him self for his anomaly, he must certainly have despised them which almost certainly explains the fascination felt by Gidc and so many of his heroes for countries like North Africa. It is not necessary to despise people who are one's inferior s whose inferiority, by the way, is amply demonstrated by the fact that they appear to relish, without guilt, their sensuality.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The song says, "I know my robe's going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell." It was time to leave, and we stood in the large living room, saying good night, with everything curiously and heavily un resolved. I could not help feeling that I had failed a test, in their eyes and in my own, or that I had failed to heed a warn ing. Elijah and I shook hands, and he asked me where I was going. Wherever it was, I would be driven there-"because, when we invite someone here," he said, "we take the respon sibility of protec ting him from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he's going." I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town. I confess that for a fraction of a second I hesitated to give the address the kind of address that in Chicago, as in all American cities, identified itself as a white address by virtue of its location. Bu t I did give it, and Elijah and I walked out onto the steps, and one of the young men vanished to get the car. It was very strange to stand with Elijah tor those few moments, facing those vivid, violent, so problematical streets. I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fu ry, and, yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets-because 332 THE FIR E NE XT TIME of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine-we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies. The car arrived-a gleaming, metallic, grossly Amer ican blu e-and Elijah and I shook hands and said good night once more. He walked into his mansion and shut the door. The driver and I started on our way through dark, mur muring -and, at this hour, strangely beautiful-Chicago, along the lake. We returned to the discussion of the land. How were we-Negroes-to get this land? I asked this of the dark boy who had said earlier, at the table, that the white man's actions proved him to be a devil. He spoke to me first of the Muslim temples that were being built, or were about to be built, in various parts of the United States, of the strength of the Muslim t<>llowing, and of the amount of money that is annually at the disposal of Negroes-something like twenty billion dollars.