THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA (1974)

Here’s Publishers Weekly description The Original of Laura:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world [...] It would be a mistake for readers to come to this expecting anything resembling a novel, though the few actual scenes here are unmistakably Nabokovian — a character named Hubert H. Hubert molesting a girl, a decaying old man's strained attempt at perfunctory sex with his younger wife. The story appears to be about a woman named Flora (spelled, once, as Flaura), who has Lolita-like moments in her childhood and is later the subject of a scandalous novel, Laura, written by a former lover. Mostly, this amounts to a peek inside the author's process and mindset as he neared death. Indeed, mortality, suicide, impotence, a disgust with the male human body—and an appreciation of the fit, young female body—figure prominently.

Because it’s an unfinished first draft, The Original of Laura can be difficult to read, but some of the themes of nympholepsy are clear. For example, Adam Lind, a photographer and the son of the painter Lev Linde, married Lanskaya, a ballerina. After Adam committed suicide, Lanskaya found an "elderly but still vigorous" lover in Hubert H. Hubert, who was deeply attracted to Flora, Lanskaya's "lovely" 12-year-old daughter.  

Flora was "alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly "prowled" around her […] she did not dare to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and "pushing" old male." (57)

"In one scene, while Flora, with her dark blue eyes and silky blondish hair, was in bed "with a chest cold," (63) Hubert "brought his pet a thoughtful present: a miniature chess set" (65) but the game didn't last long because "[a]fter a few minutes of play Flora grew tired of it, put a rook in her mouth, ejected it [ ...] Then, with a father's sudden concern, he said, "I'm afraid you are chilly my love," and plunging a hand under the bedclothes from his vantage point at the footboard, he felt her shins. Flora uttered a yelp and then a few screams." (71)

Hubert never got his wish to be with Flora, but she "was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity". (77) And she had a lipstick lesbian fling with a “fun loving little Japanese [girl] who would twist her limbs into a pretzel”. (95)

By the time Flora was 24, she was "extravagantly slender," had "cup-sized breasts," and due to her beauty she "seemed a dozen years younger,"  i.e., Flora looked like a beautiful twelve-year-old. (15)

According to Couturier, The Original of Laura's Hubert H. Hubert is “an obvious replica of Humbert Humbert…He was the perfect nympholept, obviously, but contrary to Humbert, he never managed to become sexually intimate with his stepdaughter.” (91)

Sources:

Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire. 
           Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kindle Edition.  
Nabokov, Vladimir, and Dmitri Nabokov. The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun. 
           Penguin Classics, 2009.

LOLITA (1955)

LOLITA (1955)

Lolita’s plot summary: Humbert Humbert (H.H.), a middle-aged literature professor, is enticed by Dolores “Lolita” Haze, a twelve-year-old nymphet. Humbert strategically marries Lolita’s mother and after the mother dies, Humbert takes his nymphet on a road trip where they begin a sexual affair, but Lolita’s secret sexual affair with Quilty, a playwright and fellow nympholept, ends badly for Humbert and Quilty. 

In a Rookie magazine article for teens, “Older Men: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Them, and Weren’t at All Afraid to Ask.”, Amy Rose Spiegel misleadingly wrote that Lolita, a novel that Spiegel “romanticized” as a nymphet, was a “[...] story about an adult man kidnapping, molesting, and raping an adolescent girl”. However, novelist Robertson Davies' assessment of the book as “[...] not [about] the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but [about] the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child” is more accurate. 

1. Nabokov stated in a 1967 Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (vol. III, no. 2) interview with Alfred Appel that of all his novels, he held the greatest affection for Lolita and, unsurprisingly, the nympholepsy motif appears almost immediately. 

The beginning of the third sentence: “Lo-lee-ta […]” gives the readers their first allusion to nympholepsy. (9) Alfred Appel Jr, wrote in the notes to The Annotated Lolita: “[…] the middle syllable alludes to [Poe’s] “Annabel Lee” (1949) […]” (328) 

Interestingly, Poe is alluded to over twenty times in the novel. And that the apparent connections between Humbert and Poe are their “child brides”. (330) Nabokov elaborates on page forty-three: “Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla.” 

Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm

Appel noted that Poe was twenty-seven when he married, à la Jerry Lee Lewis, Virginia Clemm, his thirteen-year-old cousin. (357)

2. H.H. lists some historical points to support nympholepsy. He begins by giving a brief history of the age of consent laws: 

“Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons).” (19)

Appel noted that “the Act actually reads: “‘Child’ means a person under the age of fourteen years […] ‘Young Person’ means a person who has attained the age of fourteen years and is under the age of seventeen years” (341)

3. H.H. wrote that: “Hugh Broughton [an English theologian] […] proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age.” (19) 

Appel noted that the allusion is to Broughton’s A Consent on Scripture (1588) in which he wrote that Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute in the "Book of Joshua" (2:1-21), was a nymphet.

Consequently, H.H. couldn’t understand why a sixteen-year-old nymphet is legal (in some states e.g., New Jersey), but a twelve-year-old is illegal. “[…] I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.” (18)

4. H.H. describes some pictures. One of nymphets singing, which may be a reference to two stanzas from Virgil's Eclogues that reads: 

“Who could the Nymphets sing? Who strew the ground \ With blooming plants, or mantle o'er the springs”. 

And a wall painting of “pre-nubile” nude Neferneferure and Neferneferuaten – two daughters of King Akhnaten and Queen Nefertiti and ten-year-old brides straddling fascinum (i.e., ivory dildos):

“Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone […] Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship.” (19)

Neferneferure and Neferneferuaten & Fascinum

5. H.H. related that: “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.” (19) 

Appel confirms that this is true and that Nabokov’s reference was Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex. (342) 

6. According to Appel (342), Petrach was twenty-three when he: “fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.” (19)

7. H.H. wrote that a judge would consider his initial reaction to seeing Lolita as: “mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit vert.” (40) 

Appel noted from Nabokov that fruit vert (French for green fruit) is: “French (dated) slang for “‘unripe’ females attractive to ripe gentlemen” (356)

8. Here’s another allusion to Poe and Virginia: 

“The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies for individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. [French: I can imagine that.] They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet.” (43) 

In addition to the French translation, Appel noted that “Monsieur Poe-poe” is an allusion to “popo”, which is French argot for posterior. (358)

9. “My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward by glimmering darling, stopping and retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze of wonderland had begun to affect my thought […]” 

Appel noted the following about “A breeze from wonderland”: 

There are several references to Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept […] 

“I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” said Nabokov, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” 

Alice Liddell as "The Beggar Maid"

Again, Appel referenced Nabokov’s Wisconsin Studies interview where Nabokov stated in reference to Carroll\Dodgson: “He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” (381-382)

In another reference to Carroll’s book, H.H. wrote: “[…] I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair.” (264)

10. H.H. described himself: “I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.” (43)

The “crooner or actor chap” is an allusion to Clare Quilty (358) and H.H. made a revealing point that a nymphet can have a “crush” on a middle-aged man.

For example, I related in The Allure of Nymphets that according to Guralnick and Jorgensen’s Elvis: Day by Day, twenty-four-year-old Elvis met fourteen-year-old Priscilla on September 13, 1959. Everything Elvis by Helen Clutton related that Elvis met the nymphet at a party at his home in Germany while he was in the military. Interestingly, Suzanne Finstad related in Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley that fourteen-year-old Priscilla had sex with Curry Grant, a twenty-seven-year-old friend of Elvis, in exchange for being introduced to the singer. Hence, Priscilla (allegedly) initiated the age-gap relationship. 

Thus, H.H.’s statements that: “[…] the Haze woman […] was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of me enjoying the Lo.” (56) and that “[…] it was she [referring to Lo] who seduced me” (132) were accurate. 

For example, before Lo left for Camp Q, H.H. shared that: “My Lolita, who was half in and about to slam the car door […] looked up-and dashed back into the house […] and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling.” (66) 

After H.H. picked up Lo from camp he asked, “Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?” She responded, “Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?” (112) And before they had sex for the first time, “Okay,” said Lolita, “here is where we start?” (133)

11. Before Lolita rested her legs on Hubert’s lap, she showed him a picture in a magazine: “[…] a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. (58)

Maurice Couturier wrote in Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire: “The whole scene, rather the photo itself, may point towards another painting, L’Impromptu de Versailles, painted by Magritte in 1933 to illustrate a book entitled Violette Nozière: it shows a grown-up man sitting on a chair and holding a young girl on his knees whom he strokes under her dress; facing him, there is another man with a solemn face, a top hat, holding a leather briefcase under his arm who looks like a syncretic representation of Freud and the painter.” (270)

Magritte's L’Impromptu de Versailles (1933)

Violette Nozière is about eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière who poisoned her parents, because her father had been allegedly molesting her since she was twelve. The 1978 film adaptation of the 1933 true-crime portrayed Nozière as a teleiophile who had a number of affairs with older men.

12. “Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.” (70) 

Appel noted that Charlotte is a reference to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) where, to his detriment, Werther falls in love with Charlotte, a young girl, who is engaged to Albert – a man eleven years her senior.

13. H.H. exclaimed: “We [i.e., nympholepts] are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do.” (88) 

Appel didn’t note an allusion, but this reminded me of a post on the Daily Mail where it was reported on 24 March 2015 that [at least] fifty-four Colombian nymphets were raped between 2003 and 2007 in the town of Melgar by American troops and contractors. (Some of the rapes were boldly filmed and sold.) In particular, in August of 2007, US sergeant Michael J. Coen and defense contractor Cesar Ruiz [allegedly] drugged and raped a twelve-year-old Colombian maiden. Colombian prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Coen and Ruiz but, per the Daily Mail, they weren't detained due to diplomatic immunity.

14. H.H. related, correctly, that the “old link between the adult world and the child world has been [recently and] completely severed” (124): 

“We are not surrounded in our enlightened era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainer’s fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children.” (124) 

I wrote in The Allure of Nymphets that Neil Postman related in The Disappearance of Childhood that as recent as two hundred years ago, the concept of childhood did not exist, there was no distinction between “children” and adults, and that the separation originated during the Renaissance when the printing press was invented. Additionally, celebrating a child's birthday or even paying attention to birth dates is a relatively recent custom. 

Postman purported that the disappearance of literacy, education, and shame that occurred during the Dark and Middle ages in Europe lead to the disappearance of childhood with the loss of literacy being attributed to three factors: the difficult to read elaborate and disguised letters of the alphabet, the scarcity of papyrus and parchment, and the desire of the Roman Church to use illiteracy as a form of control.

With no literacy in the Middle Ages, what we consider today to be childhood ended at age seven, which was when most humans had a command over speech and was considered an adult. There were schools in the Middle Ages, but instead of teaching reading and writing the students underwent “on-the-job-training” in classrooms with other students whose ages ranged from ten to adults of all ages. Even at ten-years-old, the students lived away from their parents in what could be described as dorms.  Consequently, since there was no social distinction between “children” and adults, the “children” were exposed to everything. 

However, the invention of the printing press initiated the distinction between children and adults and the bridge from childhood to adulthood was only crossed by learning how to read. As a result, a new form of schooling was required. Children were no longer placed in mix-aged classrooms to learn a trade. Children were placed in classes with other children close to their own ages and taught a curriculum that emphasized literacy. Sound familiar?

Just like Postman, Richard Farson’s research in Birthrights lead him to the conclusion that children were invented in the 16th century in Europe during the Reformation and Renaissance periods. That was when children were no longer thought of as little people but as fragile potential adults (i.e., children) who needed to be protected and educated. However, it still took another two-hundred years before “children” began to be separated by age in school.

Farson wrote that prior to the seventeenth century children were not considered innocent, were not segregated, and were not prevented from participating in adult conversations where salacious topics like sex were discussed. There were no children’s stories or books, and it was common for girls to get married at the age of thirteen. For example, Louis XIII was fourteen when he married thirteen-year-old Anne of Austria.

In New York State, anyone under eighteen-years-old must show an employment certificate before he or she may begin work, but prior to the 16th century, people began working, especially the poor, at the age of eight to help the family financially. Only seven percent of fourteen through seventeen-year-olds were enrolled in school while the other 93% worked – some of them worked more than twelve hours per day. And the hardships children endured during the European and North American Industrial Revolutions are well known.

New York magazine had an April 8, 2013 cover story on "Childhood in New York" and printed Jennifer Senior's article "Little Grown-ups and Their Progeny". Senior's report was consistent with the research that I related in The Allure of Nymphets about childhood being a relatively recent invention.

Senior related that up until the end of the WWII, children were expected to contribute to the family financially. Particular to New York City, newsboys were rampant, but delivering newspapers wasn’t their only source of income. They "blacked boots, scavenged for junk, and shuttled messages and goods.” But “child poverty, child abuse, and exploitative labor practices” lead to an effort by reformers and the government (e.g. Children’s Bureau) to protect children.

However, Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of Childhood in America, said, “They [reformers and the government] viewed kids smoking at 10 and 12 and having independent money and walking into bars as the worst thing in the world. It reminds you that "child" is a label, not a reality. 

Clearly, prior to the end the WWII and before the American economy prospered, young people (i.e., children) were expected to behave as adults in terms of earning a living wage. And their adult behavior, in terms of vices, was condoned. One could even possess a ten-year-old prostitute in New York City.

However, as Postman related, things have [almost] gone full circle. Today, “children” behave more like adults. For example, they drink, smoke, take drugs, have sex, and are (virtual) teen strippers. The Internet has broken the barrier that the invention of the printing press once erected. 

In “Porn Before Puberty?”, a 2012 ABC News feature, Winnifred Bonjean Alpart shared that when she was in eighth grade: "[…] boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that." In addition, the feature related that nine out of ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen have viewed pornography on the Internet. However, high school and age of consent laws continue to keep (most) "children" and adults separated.  

"Why You Truly Never Leave High School" was printed in the January 20, 2013 issue of New York magazine. The article is about how high school is a sadistic institution and how new research suggests that high school may be worst possible place for a vulnerable sixteen-year-old mind. Here's an excerpt:

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just sixteen hours per week interacting with adults and sixty with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.”

Lastly on this topic, I related in The Allure of Nymphets from Mary E. Odem's Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 that until 1897 the age of consent in California and most states was ten. That's correct, ten-years-old. It was twelve in seven states and even more shocking, it was seven in Delaware. How did the ages get so low? Our early age of consent laws originated over the pond. How did the age of consent go from ten, in most states, to seventeen? Feminists are to blame thank. 

Odem related that after the 19th century, young women started working outside of the house and consequently became more promiscuous. Feminists blamed the raunchy behavior of young women on "dirty old men," and successfully lobbied to have the age of consent raised. However, it backfired, and young women became even more licentious. 

Consequently, feminists realized that issues like abuse, education, and poverty had more to do with the erratic behavior of nymphets than older men, but it was too late. The damage had already been done. The age of consent laws had been changed. 

However, there were two unsuccessful attempts to lower the age of consent. There was an effort in 1889 in Kansas to lower the age to twelve. And in 1890, New Yorkers attempted to lower the age fourteen. Interestingly, the age of consent is still low in most of countries across the pond. For example, it's fourteen in Germany, it's fifteen in France, and it's thirteen in Spain.

15. The only thing a nympholept likes more than a nymphet are two nymphets. We learned that Lolita was “debauched” by a pre-teen lipstick lesbian:

At the hotel, H.H. suspected that Lo had been taught to kiss by a little [lipstick] lesbian:

“Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her that.” (133)

H.H. confirmed his suspicions when Lo shared how she had been debauched:

“She told me the way she had been debauched […]. Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. That tent-mate (“quite a derelict character,” “half-crazy,” but a “swell kid”) instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo refused to tell me her name […]”

“Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive.” 

“I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl.” 

I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? 

“Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest. (136)

16. H.H. wrote: “The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around […]” And H.H. learned via an “urgent and well-paid request really incredible details concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine at the seaside.” (191)  

While Lolita was out playing, H.H. entertained Mona who was coming to practice a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Mona shared with a concerned H.H.: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (191) 

Rigger was mention previously: “All this noise about boys gags me, “she had scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand […] there was a sly quip: “What about Rigger?” 

And in The Taming of the Shrew, Bianca Minola, the modest young sister of Katherine, is courted by Gremio, a “greybeard” elderly suitor.

17. Lolita described to H.H. the “things” that Quilty wanted her to do: “Oh, weird, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” After which, H.H. noted: (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.) (276)

Appel noted that “Sade’s Justine” is a reference to Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) by the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and that Justine was: “an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She undergoes and array of rapes, beatings, and tortures […]” (442)

And Quilty shared with H.H.: “[…] I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth century sexcapades.” (298)

Justine wasn’t the only nymphet who was abused in Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). There were others. Here’s an excerpt that will serve as a fitting example: “Hardly have we taken up our post when Rodin enters, leading a fourteen-year-old girl, blond and as pretty as Love; the poor creature is sobbing away, all too unhappily aware of what awaits her […]” (536)

18. For Lolita’s birthday, H.H. gifted her a bicycle and a copy of History of Modern American Painting. H.H. admitted that the way that Lolita mounted and straddled the bicycle: “[…] afforded me supreme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground […]” (199) 

Appel noted that the Doris Lee painting is a reference to “Noon”, which depicts a man asleep with his hat covering his face upon a haystack as a hoyden (i.e., a boisterous girl) and a man make love in the foreground. (403)

Doris Lee's Noon

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! (1974)

Richard Poirier wrote in a New York Times review of Look at the Harlequins!: “After Joyce with his “portrait” of Stephen, after Proust with his “remembrance” of Marcel, there are few reasons to be surprised […] by the complicated interplay between Vladimir Nabokov and the narrator of this, his 37th book. Vadim Vadimovitch is a Russian emigré writer and a mirror image or “double” of Nabokov as man and writer”.

1. Vadim and Iris, his future first wife, were sunbathing on the French Riviera when Vadim spotted a nymphet: “There was a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball in her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frilly harness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She was what in a later era amateurs were to call a ‘nymphet’.” As she caught my glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under her auburn fringe.” (29)

Couturier wrote in Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire that Vadim is referring to Nabokov as the later era amateur. (73)

To impress Vadim, Iris shared: “At eleven or twelve […] I was as pretty as that French orphan [...] I let smelly gentlemen fondle me.” (29)

2. After Vadim moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Stepanov, he became attracted to Dolly, the Stepanov's eleven-year-old grand-daughter. Vadim wrote in his (fictional) autobiography: “Those were nice, nice interludes! [...] I had a box of chocolate-coated biscuits to supplement the zwiebacks and tempt my little visitor. The writing board was put aside and replaced by her folded limbs [...] she dangled one leg and bit her biscuit, to the ordinary questions one puts to a child; and then quite suddenly in the midst of our chat, she would wriggle out of my arms and make for the door as if somebody were summoning her”. (78)

Couturier wrote that Dolly “is evidently an avatar of Emmie in Invitation to a Beheading, and of Lolita herself, a true nymphet” and that Vadim “a farcical avatar of Nabokov, will wait for her to grow up before undertaking to make love to her.” (78)

3. Subsequently, Vadim became more and more attracted to Isabel, his twelve-year-old daughter. “One change, one gradational trend I must note, however. This was my growing awareness of her beauty. Scarcely a month after her arrival I was already at a loss to understand how she could have struck me as ‘plain.’” (168)

Vadim doesn't consummate with his biological daughter; however: “During his cohabitation with Bel, he is very happy and sexually aroused most of the time, but he only caresses her: 'Save for a few insignificant lapses – a few hot drops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff – my relations with her remained essentially innocent'” (173)

4. Vadim was invited by Mrs. King to an "impromptu soirée". (175). At the gathering were "only six people in a spacious parlor, not counting two painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress [...]" (176)

Subsequently: "[...] The two cold-thighed chessy-necked girleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who would sit on my left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle Left Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay kept bending toward me and saying in a macabre accent: "Elles vous aiment tant! Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squeal they resumed their running around, like the eternal little pleasure-park train, brushing the brambles. (180)

Couturier noted that “that side of [his] lap where the honey was” was another poetic metaphor to avoid naming the real thing. (86)

5. Couturier wrote: "Dolly, whom he had fondled but not possessed at the time when she was a nymphet, reappears at this point in the story; she is now twenty-four. She claims she had 'always had a crush' on him when he mesmerized her on his lap, 'playing sweet Uncle Gasper'". (83)

"One day, she walks into his office at the university and challenges him to make love to her, emulating Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters: Smiling, she swept the examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be the tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier [when she was eleven]. The ultimate convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor came a burst of applause at the end of Professor King’s last lecture of the season." (139–40)

Sources:

Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire. Palgrave
        Macmillan, 2014. Kindle Edition.   
Nabokov, Vladimir. Look at the Harlequins!. McGraw-Hill , 1974.  
Poirier, Richard. “Look at the Harlequins!” The New York Times, 13 Oct. 1974, 
       www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-r-harlequins.html.

PALE FIRE (1962)

 
Pale Fire is in three parts: A foreword by Charles Kinbote, John Shade's poem "Pale Fire",  and Kinbote's commentary.

1. “Otar, a pleasant and cultured adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair, [who] had his two mistresses with him, eighteen-year-old Fifalda (whom he later married) and seventeen-year-old Fleur”. (105)

2. Kinbote narrates how Griff, a farmer, summoned Garh, his young daughter, to be the King’s escape guide:

A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: “Garh! Garh!” Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man’s shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father’s wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan. (141)

He sank down on the grass near a patch of matted elfin-wood and inhaled the bright air. The panting dog lay down at his feet. Garh smiled for the first time. Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception. As soon as she had settled beside him, she bent over and pulled over and off her tousled head the thick gray sweater, revealing her naked back and blanc-mangé breasts, and flooded her embarrassed companion with all the acridity of ungroomed womanhood. She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a gesture and got up. He thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King started to walk up the turfy incline. (142)

3.  On Griff’s mantelpiece was: "a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife—Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes.” (141)  

Source:

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Penguin, 1989.

PNIN (1957)

 
Charles Poore, his in New York Times review of Pnin, summarized the book by writing:

The central character is our old friend, the absentminded professor […] an émigré of the old Russian school. He is tremendously proud of his American citizenship, enchanted with the glittering gadgetry of our culture, lonely, loquacious and heroic. He teaches classic Russian literature at Waindell […] After ten years among the cliques and cards at Waindell, Pnin has a heady feeling that he has finally achieved security of sorts. His genially acerb colleagues lampoon him mercilessly, but he finds in their own folklore grounds for a measure of hilarity. Naturally, he looks mainly to the past for the substance of his stature as a man of learning. Yet each time he changes his place of residence he acquires new insights to the ways of the not quite inscrutable New World.

1. In Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin, Gennadi Barabtarlo noted at least three references to Ivan Bunin in Pnin. For example, while Pnin was waiting to give a lecture: 

“In the middle of the front row of seats he saw one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace and the blond wig she had worn at all the performances given by the great ham actor Khodotov […]” (27) Barabtarlo wrote: “The wry phrase “the great ham actor” can be traced back to Ivan Bunin’s The Life of Arsen’ev (1930) […]” ( 85) 

Vladimir Vladimirovich, Pnin’s narrator, related that Bunin could be found “swarming all over” The Pines with other Russian “[…] liberals and intellectuals who had left Russia around 1920 […]”. (117) And Vladimirovich related that Konstatin Ivanich shared a villa in Grasses, southern France, “with several other Russian expatriates.” (125) Barabtarlo wrote: “Ivan Bunin, who lived in Grasse in the twenties and thirties, was one of them.” (206)
 

Unsurprisingly, Boyd related in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years that Nabokov “cherished” Bunin. (94) And Maxim D. Shrayer related in “Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin: A Reconstruction ” that: 

“Marina Turkevich Naumann [the author of Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920s] lists Bunin among Nabokov’s major Russian influences.” And that: “Several émigré critics, including, Gleb Struve, Jurij Ivask, Aleksndr Savel’ev, Michail Cetlin, Vladimir Vekdle pointed out affinities between the two writers [e.g., Nabokov and Bunin],” (396)

 

While Nabokov and Bunin eventually fell out of favor and Bunin’s Dark Avenues was driven, according to Shrayer, by a desire to reclaim his status over Nabokov as the foremost Russian writer (394), it’s worth taking a stroll through Dark Avenues.

Oleg Mikhailov wrote in The Works by I.A. Bunin that Dark Avenues is "the only book in the history of Russian literature devoted entirely to the concept of love" and that the classic of Russian literature is considered to be Bunin's magnum opus. 

According Alma Classics, Dark Avenues, if not the most read, is one of the most read volumes of short stories in Russia. And in a blurb, Nabokov said of Bunin in reference to Dark Avenues”: “A most powerful ‘connoisseur of colours’. One could write an entire dissertation of his colour schemes.”

Here is the opening of Bunin's “Tanya”:

“She was working as a housemaid in the house of his relation Madame Kazakov, who owned a small estate. She was just seventeen years old; her tiny figure was especially noticeable when she walked barefoot, her skirt swaying gently from side to side and her little breasts moving under her blouse […] her simple little face could be called pleasing, and her grey peasant eyes had no beauty other than that of youth.” (97) And Tanya, an orphan, was described as a “half-childish girl” with an “intoxicating scent of something rural and virginal”. (99)

Petrusha, on his way back to Moscow, had stopped to visit Kazakova in the country. In the middle of the night “He lit a match and caught sight of her asleep. She was lying on her back on a wooden bed, in a blouse and cotton skirt - her little breasts showed roundness through her blouse, her legs were bare to the knees[...] The match went out. He stood there – and gently approached the bed [...]” (99)

“He moved her legs apart in their tender warmth [...]” “[...] and he began to kiss her neck, her breast, inhaling that intoxicating scent of something rural and virginal. And she, through her tears, suddenly gave a spontaneous feminine response – strongly, and it seemed gratefully, embracing him and pressing his head to her breast.” (100) 

After subsequent sexual conquests with the nymphet, to Tanya's utter dismay, Petrusha left the country never to visit again.

“Tanya” is just one of a number of short stories in Dark Avenues that contains nympholepsy.

Avon Books' Pnin Cover

2. There is no clear indication that Pnin was an acting ephebophile: “Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long ceased to notice the existence of students on campus […] except for a girl’s comely nape here and there, he saw nobody in the Reading Room.” (61) But that didn’t stop Avon Books from publishing Pnin (1957) with Pnin on the cover, a phallic cane in one hand and his portful’ in the other, ogling three college coeds.

3. While Pnin was inspecting the house where he would rent a room, he “peered” into Isabel’s room, the daughter of the homeowners, and “inspected Hoecker’s “Girl with a Cat” above the bed, and Hunt’s “The Belated Kid” above the bookshelf.” (34) 

Balthus (Baltusz Klossowski de Rola)
Girl with Cat, 1937

Eric Naiman wrote in Nabokov, Perversely that Hoecker's “Girl with a Cat” may have been a reference to Balthus' "Jeune Fille au Chat", which is one of Balthus’ most controversial paintings out of many of his revealing paintings and Polaroids of nymphets. In the oil on wood, a nymphet is reclining with her hands behind her head with her left foot resting on the chair, which causes her panties to be exposed below her schoolgirl skirt.

William Morris Hunt’s The Belated Kid, 1854–57

William Morris Hunt’s “The Belated Kid” is on view in the Penny and Jeff Vinik Gallery in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Here’s a summary of the description of the painting from the museum’s website:

Hunt began this monumental image of a peasant girl and her rescued kid about 1854 […] It proved so popular when exhibited in the United States that Boston collector Peter Chardon Brooks […] commissioned a replica.

The painting clearly was inspired by Millet’s pictures of peasant children [17.1484], especially those depicting young girls diligently watching over one or two cows or sheep. In Hunt’s version of the subject, a kid that strayed and was found again is carried home by a pretty barefoot shepherdess […] While Hunt’s image echoes Millet’s images of rural labor, it is considerably more romantic in its presentation of the innocence and goodness of these hardworking peasant children.

And who was one of Nabokov's favorite painters? Based on my leading question, you may have been able to guess that it is none other than Balthasar Klossowski de Rola or simply Balthus. Nabokov shared in Strong Opinions, "The aspects of Picasso that I emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist I do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures, is Balthus." (167) And Balthus said, translated into English, in the documentary Balthus the Painter (1996), referring to Nabokov, “I think we feel the same thing in the presence of young girls.”

4. Pnin attended a program at New Hall:

The first part of the program, three ancient movie shorts, bored our friend: that cane, that bowler, that white face, those black, arched eyebrows, those twitchy nostrils meant nothing to him. Whether the incomparable comedian danced in the sun with chapleted nymphs near a waiting cactus, or was a prehistoric man (the supple cane now a supple club), or was glared at by burly Mack Swain at a hectic night club, old-fashioned, humorless Pnin remained indifferent. “Clown,” he snorted to himself. “Even Glupishkin and Max Linder used to be more comical.” (80)

I would imagine that most readers immediately noticed the allusion to Charlie Chaplin. Specifically, Barabtarlo noted that the passage is alluding to Chapin’s Sunnyside (1919), His Prehsitoric Past (1914), and Caught in a Cabaret (1914). And Barabtarlo related: “In an interview with Alfred Appel, Nabokov admitted that he, unlike Pnin, “enjoyed tremendously American comedy – Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Chaplin.” (142)

I related in The Allure of Nymphets: From Emperor Augustus to Woody Allen, A Study of Man's Fascination with Very Young Women that Charlie Chaplin confessed that he had a violent crush on a specific nymphet and generally loved young girls. And that Joyce Milton shared in her book, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, that Chaplin acknowledged, “I had a violent crush on a girl only ten or twelve. I have always been in love with young girls [...]” (23)

And author and ephebophile J.D. Salinger was livid after Chaplin married Oona O'Neill. Salinger and O'Neill began an affair when O'Neill was sixteen-years-old, but after Salinger joined the Army, eighteen-year-old O'Neill moved to Los Angeles and married fifty-five-year-old Chaplin. (54-55)

Interestingly, Barbara Wyllie wrote in "'My Age of Innocence Girl' - Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo" about the influence that Chaplin had on Nabokov. For example, there's an additional reference to Chaplin's toothbrush mustache in Lolita and Chaplin appeared on a movie poster in Nabokov's short story “Easter Rain” (1925). (10)

In addition, Wyllie wrote that "[...] it could be argued that the particular nature of Chaplin’s incarnation in Lolita is linked to Nabokov’s 1928 poem, “Lilith,” via The Kid, Chaplin’s silent feature of 1921." (12) And that: “of his later novels – Luzhin's collapse in The Defense (1930), the surreal pantomine of Invitation to a Beheading (1938) […] Meanwhile, Chaplin's most famous on-screen persona steps into the worlds of The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pnin (1957).” (10)

In The Kid (1921), a nymphet in wings, played by Chaplin's twelve-year-old future wife Lillita McMurray, who wrote a tell-all book about the marriage, is told by Sin (i.e., The Devil) to "vamp" (i.e., seduce) the Tramp (Chaplin). The winged nymphet and the Tramp kissed before her Sweetheart arrived. She and her Sweetheart, who was played by a man who appeared to be a lot older than even thirty-two-year-old Chaplin, kissed before he allowed the nymphet and the Tramp to embrace and kiss again. However, after the nymphet refused to release her embrace of the Tramp, her Sweetheart became jealous and pummeled the Tramp.

Sources:

Barabtarlo, Gennadi. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin. Ardis, 1989.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Vintage, 1993.

Bunin, Ivan. Dark Avenues. Translated by Hugh A. Aplin, One World Classics, 2008. 

Chaplin, Charlie. The Kid. Associated First National Pictures, 1921. 

Ibrahim, Mo. The Allure of Nymphets: From Emperor Augustus to Woody Allen, A Study of Man's Fascination with Very Young Women. 2nd ed., Lad Literature, 2017.

Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Cornell University Press, 2010. 

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. Vintage, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. Penguin, 2012.

Poore, Charles. Books of the Times. The New York Times, 7 Mar. 1957, www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-r-pnin.html.

Wyllie, Barbara. “‘MY AGE OF INNOCENCE GIRL’ — HUMBERT, CHAPLIN, LITA AND     LO.” Nabokov Online Journal, IX, 2005.