Describing his life with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his essay on “Mimir and Memory” that appeared in the Cantrip Review:
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze - dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat - the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we ewer in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!
I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started a chain of ideas that resulted in my publishing in the Cantrip Review an essay on “Mimir and Memory,” in which I suggested among other things that seemed original and important to that splendid review’s benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind’s being conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus creating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past). In result of this venture - and in culmination of the impression made by my previous travaux I was called from New York, where Rita and I were living in a little flat with a view of gleaming children taking shower baths far below in a fountainous arbor of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four hundred miles away, for one year. I lodged there, in special apartments for poets and philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita whom I preferred not to display vegetated - somewhat indecorously, I am afraid - in a roadside inn where I visited her twice a week. Then she vanished - more humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the local jail. She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards we drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few hours the year before. (2.26)
Cantrip is a word of Scots origin to mean a magical spell of any kind, or one which reads the same forwards and backwards. It can also be a witch's trick, or a sham. It is possibly derived from the Gaelic canntaireachd, a piper's mnemonic chant. The Piped Piper of Hamelin (1842) is a narrative poem by Robert Browning, the author of Memorabilia (1855) – a poem that begins with the line “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain” and ends in the line “Well, I forget the rest.” Describing Lolita’s escape from the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert “quotes” Browning’s poem Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister (“Saint, forsooth! While Brown Dolores / Squats outside the Convent bank / With Sanchicha, telling stories, / Steeping tresses in the tank”):
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However - likewise for reasons of show - regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning… She did not remember where the various things she wanted were… “Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying nit he motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary… No doubt, I was a little delirious - and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle - but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine
which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two p. m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. (2.22)
In Browning’s poem the speaker wonders what is the Greek name for "swine's snout:"
At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
What's the Greek name for "swine's snout"?
The dandelion is called in Latin rostrum porcinum (swine's snout). The unkempt lawn of the Haze house in Ramsdale house is crowded with dandelions:
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog - I loathe dogs - had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheers - at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car - not Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair - a nymphet, by Pan! - ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pause - and then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it. (1.17)
Rita is a short form of Margarita, a feminine given name that means “pearl.” It brings to mind the saying [nolite mittere] margaritas ante porcos ([don't throw] pearls before swine). This saying is based on the verse found in the Bible (Matthew 7:6) in which it is written: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”
Poor Charlotte (Lolita's mother who casts her pearls before Humbert) dies under the wheels of a truck because of a neighbor's hysterical dog.
Humbert thinks that the fiend who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital is either in Tartary or burning away in his cerebellum. In The Piped Piper of Hamelin the Piper mentions Tartary:
He advanced to the council-table:
And, "Please your honors," said he, "I'm able,
By means of a secret charm, to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun,
That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me so as you never saw!
And I chiefly use my charm
On creatures that do people harm,
The mole and toad and newt and viper;
And people call me the Pied Piper."
(And here they noticed round his neck
A scarf of red and yellow stripe,
To match with his coat of the self-same check;
And at the scarf's end hung a pipe;
And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying
As if impatient to be playing
Upon this pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.)
"Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am,
In Tartary I freed the Cham,
Last June, from his huge swarm of gnats;
I eased in Asia the Nizam
Of a monstrous brood of vampyre-bats:
And as for what your brain bewilders--
If I can rid your town of rats
Will you give me a thousand guilders?"
"One? Fifty thousand!" was the exclamation
Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation. (VI)
Rita’s brother is the mayor of Grainball who pays his sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never enter Grainball:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did - and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband - and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was - and no doubt still is - a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
At the beginning of his Letter to Maria Gisborne P. B. Shelley mentions the silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves and memory that may clothe in wings his living name and feed it with the asphodels of fame:
The spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought –
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day –
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,
Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grown, making love an immortality.
In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) The Doubtful Asphodel is Sebastian Knight’s final book:
In those last and saddest years of his life Sebastian wrote The Doubtful Asphodel, which is unquestionably his masterpiece. Where and how dig he write it? In the reading room of the British Museum (far from Mr Goodman's vigilant eye). At a humble table deep in the corner of a Parisian 'bistro' (not of the kind that his mistress might patronize). In a deck-chair under an orange parasol somewhere in Cannes or Juan, when she and her gang had deserted him for a spree elsewhere. In the waiting room of an anonymous station, between two heart attacks. In a hotel, to the clatter of plates being washed in the yard. In many other places which I can but vaguely conjecture. The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. A man is dying, and he is the hero of the tale; but whereas the lives of other people in the book seem perfectly realistic (or at least realistic in a Knightian sense), the reader is kept ignorant as to who the dying man is, and where his deathbed stands or floats, or whether it is a bed at all. The man is the book; the book itself is heaving and dying, and drawing up a ghostly knee. One thought-image, then another breaks upon the shores of consciousness, and we follow the thing or the being that has been evoked: stray remnants of a wrecked life; sluggish fancies which crawl and then unfurl eyed wings. They are, these lives, but commentaries to the main subject. We follow the gentle old chess player Schwarz, who sits down on a chair in a room in a house, to teach an orphan boy the moves of the knight; we meet the fat Bohemian woman with that grey streak showing in the fast colour of her cheaply dyed hair; we listen to a pale wretch noisily denouncing the policy of oppression to an attentive plainclothes man in an ill-famed public-house. The lovely tall prima donna steps in her haste into a puddle, and her silver shoes are ruined. An old man sobs and is soothed by a soft-lipped girl in mourning. Professor Nussbaum, a Swiss scientist, shoots his young mistress and himself dead in a hotel room at half past three in the morning. They come and go, these and other people, opening and shutting doors, living as long as the way they follow is lit, and are engulfed in turn by the waves of the dominant theme: a man is dying. He seems to move an arm or turn his head on what might be a pillow, and as he moves, this or that life we have just been watching, fades or changes. At moments, his personality grows conscious of itself, and then we feel that we are passing down some main artery of the book. 'Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions, and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town.' (Chapter 18)
Sebastian’s half-brother V. (the narrator in TRLSK) muses that it would not be inordinately hard to translate The Doubtful Asphodel into Russian:
The Doubtful Asphodel obtained many reviews, and most of them were long and quite flattering. But here and there the hint kept recurring that the author was a tired author, which seemed another way of saying that he was just an old bore. I even caught a faint suggestion of commiseration, as if they knew certain sad dreary things about the author which were not really in the book, but which permeated their attitude towards it. One critic even went as far as to say that he read it 'with mingled feelings, because it was a rather unpleasant experience for the reader, to sit beside a deathbed and never be quite sure whether the author was the doctor or the patient'. Nearly all the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, and that many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating. All praised Sebastian Knight's 'sincerity' – whatever that was. I wondered what Sebastian thought of those reviews.
I lent my copy to a friend who kept it several weeks without reading it, and then lost it in a train. I got another and never lent it to anybody. Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one 'think', and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners. And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate it into Russian. (ibid.)
By a lovely coincidence, my Russian translation of VN’s Ada has just come out.
As to Mimir (a figure in Norse mythology, renowned for his knowledge and wisdom), he is mentioned by Matthew Arnold in Balder Dead:
Then from their loathèd feast the gods arose,
And took their horses, and set forth to ride
O'er the bridge Bifrost, where is Heimdall's watch,
To the ash Igdrasil, and Ida's plain.
Thor came on foot, the rest on horseback rode.
And they found Mimir sitting by his fount
Of wisdom, which beneath the ash-tree springs;
And saw the Nornies watering the roots
Of that world-shadowing tree with honey-dew.
At the end of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) says that he is reasonably sure that he will wake at six tomorrow, on July the twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine:
I'm reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine;
So this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade's "Poems" on their shelf. (ll. 977-984)
A few minutes later, after writing fifteen more lines, Shade is killed by Gradus. In The Pied Piper of Hamelin the children were stolen away by the Piper on the twenty-second of July, 1376:
But when they saw 'twas a lost endeavor,
And Piper and dancers were gone forever,
They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and year,
These words did not as well appear:
"And so long after what happened here
On the twenty-second of July,
Thirteen hundred and seventy-six;"
And the better in memory to fix
The place of the children's last retreat,
They called it the Pied Piper's Street,
Where any one playing on pipe or tabor
Was sure for the future to lose his labor. (XIV)