Lolita: "...This is how Rita enters the
picture.//She was twice Lolita's age... 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...between
Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the
Tigermoth..."
JM: A question related to
Toylestown.
My bibliography about "Lolita" is very
restricted and, following Alfred Appel Jr. ( AL notes to p.258), I
read that "The invented Toylestown is a pun commemorating his
"London" ( 1794) - toil's town. ".
And yet, Appel locates an echo of T.S.Eliot's
"Gerontion" (for "depraved May") lying in the vicinity and my first impression
had been that "Toylestown" could have been an early, not very successful, wordplay
with Toilest (TSEliot).
Blake's "Tyger" came to my mind easily,
but I needed a search-machine to find a "tiger-moth". However,
only by joining Blake and Toylest and cutting off a couple of letters would I
reach John Keats, with "The Eve of Saint Agnes" flickering "tiger
moth" image, linked to stained-glass windows. (lines
211/213,XXIV: "And diamonded with panes of quaint device,/
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,/ As are the tiger-moth’s
deep-damask’d wings;"
(I understand that tiger-moths,
like dragon-flies, have inspired the names of airplanes (Dumont's Demoiselle)
and gliders (tiger moth). In ADA there are references to "libellula wings"
related to planes, not only to SD's Demoiselle.)