In his recent note in The Nabokovian, "Lolita, Blue Birds and Ovid," Gerard de Vries argues that, after her death in childbed in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest, Lolita is turned into a bird (namely, into a bluebird). In his poem Obraz tvoy, muchitel'nyi i zybkiy ("Your image, painful and unsteady," 1912) Osip Mandelshtam compares God's name that flew out of his chest to bol'shaya ptitsa (a big bird):
Образ твой, мучительный и зыбкий,
Я не мог в тумане осязать.
«Господи!», сказал я по ошибке,
Сам того не думая сказать.
Божье имя, как большая птица,
Вылетело из моей груди...
Впереди густой туман клубится,
И пустая клетка позади...
Oh your image, haunting me yet blurred,
In the fog I could not touch or feel.
«Goodness me» by error slipped the word
Unawares, yet heeding its appeal.
Name of god, like a large bird, so intensely,
Took a flight right out of my chest.
Straight ahead the fog is steaming densely
And behind me, cage's emptiness.
(tr. I. Shambat)
According to Mandelshtam, he could not osyazat' (touch) someone's image in the fog. Osyazanie (touch) is one of the five senses. The author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. was awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”):
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
After the murder of Quilty Humbert is not certain that his victim is dead and mentions Thomas (the apostle who refused to believe in Christ's resurrection until he could see and feel Jesus's crucifixion wounds) and the tactile sense:
The rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill, and presently found myself going at the same lazy pace in a direction opposite to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the boudoir and Chum in the bathroom. No, it was not a house I would have liked to live in. I wondered idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. Not that I cared; on the whole I wished to forget the whole mess - and when I did learn he was dead, the only satisfaction it gave me, was the relief of knowing I need not mentally accompany for months a painful and disgusting convalescence interrupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and relapses, and perhaps an actual visit from him, with trouble on my part to rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something. It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moment our main, if not only, handle to reality. I was all covered with Quilty - with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. (2.36)
In his Foreword to Humbert's manuscript John Ray, Jr. says that Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
Lolita outlives Humbert (who dies in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days. In his poem O net, ne raskolduesh’ serdtsa ty… (“Oh no! You cannot disenchant my heart...” 1912) Alexander Blok mentions his shade that will appear on the ninth and fortieth day after his death:
И тень моя пройдёт перед тобою
В девятый день, и в день сороковой -
Неузнанной, красивой, неживою.
Такой ведь ты искала? - Да, такой.
And suddenly you’ll see my shade appear
Before you on the ninth and fortieth day:
Unrecognized, handsome and drear,
The kind of shade you looked for, by the way!
In his poem Khudozhnik ("The Artist," 1913) Blok (who was born on November 16, 1880, OS) mentions the bird that flew to save the soul:
В жаркое лето и в зиму метельную,
В дни ваших свадеб, торжеств, похорон,
Жду, чтоб спугнул мою скуку смертельную
Лёгкий, доселе не слышанный звон.
Вот он — возник. И с холодным вниманием
Жду, чтоб понять, закрепить и убить.
И перед зорким моим ожиданием
Тянет он еле приметную нить.
С моря ли вихрь? Или сирины райские
В листьях поют? Или время стоит?
Или осыпали яблони майские
Снежный свой цвет? Или ангел летит?
Длятся часы, мировое несущие.
Ширятся звуки, движенье и свет.
Прошлое страстно глядится в грядущее.
Нет настоящего. Жалкого — нет.
И, наконец, у предела зачатия
Новой души, неизведанных сил,-
Душу сражает, как громом, проклятие:
Творческий разум осилил — убил.
И замыкаю я в клетку холодную
Лёгкую, добрую птицу свободную,
Птицу, хотевшую смерть унести,
Птицу, летевшую душу спасти.
Вот моя клетка — стальная, тяжёлая,
Как золотая, в вечернем огне.
Вот моя птица, когда-то весёлая,
Обруч качает, поет на окне.
Крылья подрезаны, песни заучены.
Любите вы под окном постоять?
Песни вам нравятся. Я же, измученный,
Нового жду — и скучаю опять.
In summer-heat or in wintertime glistening,
Days when you marry, or triumph, or die,
I would dispel deathly boredom by listening
For a soft peal yet unheard in the sky.
There it approaches, and coldly I wait for it,
Wait to get hold of it, leave it for dead.
While my attention is strained ahead straight for it,
It pulls a nearly invisible thread.
Wind from the sea? or the paradisical Sirins
are singing in the foliage? Does Time stop and stay fast?
Or is the May’s apple-blossom a-falling there
In snowy rain? Does an angel fly past?
Time is prolonged. Every wonder it cherishes;
Light, tumult, motion around me appear.
Wildly the future reflects all that perishes,
Nothing is present or pitiful here.
Finally, force inconceivable filling it,
Strains a new soul from its birth to the day, —
Curses, as thunder, attack the soul, killing it
Reason, creative, subdues it, — to slay.
Then in a shivering cage I shut wearily
That happy bird who once flew about merrily.
This was the bird that would take death from me,
This was the bird that would set the soul free.
There is the cage. Heavy, iron I fashioned it.
Golden it gleams in the sun’s setting fire.
There is the bird for you. Once so impassioned it
Swings on the hoop as it sings to the wire.
Clipped are its wings; all by heart now it sings to me —
Say, would you listen and stand by the door?
Singing may please you, — but weariness clings to me.
Once more I wait, and know boredom once more.
(tr. C. M. Bowra)
Siriny rayskie (the paradisical Sirins) in the poem's third stanza bring to mind VN's Russian nom de plume. In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita the name of Clare Quilty’s co-author, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), becomes Vivian Damor-Blok (Damor is her stage name, Blok is the name of one of her first husbands):
В угоду старомодным читателям, интересующимся дальнейшей судьбой «живых образцов» за горизонтом «правдивой повести», могу привести некоторые указания, полученные от г-на «Виндмюллера» из «Рамздэля», который пожелал остаться неназванным, дабы «длинная тень прискорбной и грязной истории» не дотянулась до того городка, в котором он имеет честь проживать. Его дочь «Луиза» сейчас студентка-второкурсница. «Мона Даль» учится в университете в Париже. «Рита» недавно вышла замуж за хозяина гостиницы во Флориде. Жена «Ричарда Скиллера» умерла от родов, разрешившись мертвой девочкой, 25-го декабря 1952 г., в далеком северо-западном поселении Серой Звезде. Г-жа Вивиан Дамор-Блок (Дамор – по сцене, Блок – по одному из первых мужей) написала биографию бывшего товарища под каламбурным заглавием «Кумир мой», которая скоро должна выйти в свет; критики, уже ознакомившиеся с манускриптом, говорят, что это лучшая ее вещь. Сторожа кладбищ, так или иначе упомянутых в мемуарах «Г. Г.», не сообщают, встает ли кто из могилы.
The bird in Blok's poem The Artist wanted to take away death and flew to save the poet's soul. According to Humbert, he wanted to use his notes at his trial to save not his head, but his soul:
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred. (2.36)
In his diary Blok says that Gumilyov defines Mandelshtam's way as from irrational to rational (the opposite of Blok's own way):
Гвоздь вечера -- И. Мандельштам, который приехал, побывав во врангелевской тюрьме. Он очень вырос. Сначала невыносимо слушать общегумилевское распевание. Постепенно привыкаешь <...> виден артист. Его стихи возникают из снов -- очень своеобразных, лежащих в областях искусства только. Гумилев определяет его путь: от иррационального к рациональному (противуположность моему). Его "Венеция". По Гумилеву -- рационально все (и любовь и влюбленность в том числе), иррациональное лежит только в языке, в его корнях, невыразимое. (В начале было Слово, из Слова возникли мысли, слова, уже непохожие на Слово, но имеющие, однако, источником Его; и все кончится Словом -- все исчезнет, останется одно Оно.)
Blok describes the poetry evening on Oct. 21, 1920, and points out that, a few days earlier, Mandelshtam arrived in Petrograd from Feodosia (a town in the Crimea) where he was arrested by the White Russians and spent some time in prison. Blok mentions Mandelshtam's Venetsiya ("Venice") - i. e., Mandelshtam's poem Venitseyskaya zhizn' ("The Venetian Life", 1920). Describing the prison library, Humbert mentions Venice Revisited by Percy Elphinstone, author of A Vagabond in Italy:
But we never were. Valechka - by now shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up, started to fill anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton, and visions of putting on my mountain boots and taking a running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put into execution with the cursed colonel hovering around all the time. I cannot say he behaved insolently or anything like that; on the contrary, he displayed, as a small sideshow in the theatricals I had been inveigled in, a discreet old-world civility, punctuating his movements with all sorts of mispronounced apologies (j’ai demandé pardonne - excuse me - est-ce que j’ai puis - may I - and so forth), and turning away tactfully when Valechka took down with a flourish her pink panties from the clothesline above the tub; but he seemed to be all over the place at once, le gredin , agreeing his frame with the anatomy of the flat, reading in my chair my newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette, counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom, helping his moll to wrap up the electric fan her father had given her, and carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom. At last both were out of the quivering apartment - the vibration of the door I had slammed after them still rang in my every nerve, a poor substitute for the backhand slap with which I ought to have hit her across the cheekbone according to the rules of the movies. Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that had prompted the good colonel (Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host’s domicile with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y., G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:
Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N. Y. Made debut in Sunburst . Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N. J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets.
Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows].
How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! (1.8)
According to Humbert, it took him fifty-six days (eight weeks) to write Lolita. Less than six weeks after Humbert's death in a New York prison, Lolita dies in childbirth in Alaska. The author of Shestoe chuvstvo ("The Sixth Sense," 1919), Gumilyov was executed by the Bolsheviks in the last week of August 1921, some three weeks after Blok’s death. At the beginning of his memoir essay Gumilyov and Blok (1931) Hodasevich says that for him both of them, Blok and Gumilyov, died on August 3:
Блок умер 7-го, Гумилёв — 27-го августа 1921 года. Но для меня они оба умерли 3-го августа. Почему — я расскажу ниже.
Lolita's mother Charlotte dies under the wheels of a truck in mid-August 1947. Vsyo na zemle umryot - i mat' i mladost' ("All on the earth will die — and youth and mother," 1909) is a poem by Blok:
Всё на земле умрёт — и мать, и младость,
Жена изменит, и покинет друг.
Но ты учись вкушать иную сладость,
Глядясь в холодный и полярный круг.
Бери свой чёлн, плыви на дальний полюс
В стенах из льда — и тихо забывай,
Как там любили, гибли и боролись…
И забывай страстей бывалый край.
И к вздрагиваньям медленного хлада
Усталую ты душу приучи,
Чтоб было здесь ей ничего не надо,
Когда оттуда ринутся лучи.
All on the earth will die — and youth and mother,
Wife will betray you, leave once faithful friend,
But you learn to enjoy the bliss another —
Look in a mirror of the polar land.
Get on your bark, sail to the distant Pole
In walls of ice — and bit by bit forget
How they loved there, perished, fought, gained goal…
Forget your passions’ ever painful set.
And let your soul, tiered all to bear,
Come used to shudder of the slow colds —
Such that it will not crave for something here,
When once from there the dazzling lighting bolts.
(tr. E. Bonver)
The poem's last word, luchi (rays), brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript). Humbert calls his first wife, née Valeria Zborovski, Valechka. In Bunin's story Zoyka and Valeria (1940) Zoyka (who is fourteen and who loves to sit in Levitski's lap) asks Valeria's permission to call her Valechka:
И вот лето пришло, и он стал приезжать каждую неделю на два, на три дня. Но тут вскоре приехала гостить племянница папы из Харькова, Валерия Остроградская, которой ни Зойка, ни Гришка никогда еще не видали. Левицкого послали рано утром в Москву встречать ее на Курском вокзале, и со станции он приехал не на велосипеде, а сидя с ней в тележке станционного извозчика, усталый, с провалившимися глазами, радостно взволнованный. Видно было, что он еще на Курском вокзале влюбился в нее, и она обращалась с ним уже повелительно, когда он вытаскивал из тележки ее вещи. Впрочем, взбежав на крыльцо навстречу маме, она тотчас забыла о нем и потом не замечала его весь день. Она показалась Зойке непонятной, — разбирая вещи в своей комнате и сидя потом на балконе за завтраком, она то очень много говорила, то неожиданно смолкала, думала что-то свое. Но она была настоящая малороссийская красавица! И Зойка приставала к ней с неугомонной настойчивостью:
— А вы привезли с собой сафьяновые сапожки и плахту? Вы наденете их? Вы позволите называть вас Валечкой?
Bunin's poem Kanareyka ("The Canary," 1921) has the epigraph from Brehm (a German zoologist, author of the multi-volume Brehms Tierleben), "in its homeland it is green:"
На родине она зеленая... Брэм
Канарейку из-за моря
Привезли, и вот она
Золотая стала с горя,
Тесной клеткой пленена.
Птицей вольной, изумрудной
Уж не будешь, — как ни пой
Про далекий остров чудный
Над трактирную толпой!
The canary was brought
from overseas, and out of sheer grief
it became golden,
imprisoned in a small cage.
You will never be a free, emerald bird again,
however you may sing
of a distant wondrous island
over the tavern crowd!
In his poem "Wanted" composed after Lolita was abducted from him Humbert quotes the starling's words "I cannot get out" in Sterne's Sentimental Journey:
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,
I cannot get out, said the starling). (2.25)
Caged birds bring to mind the newspaper story about a caged ape that, according to VN, was the initial source of inspiration for Lolita:
THE FIRST LITTLE THROB of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940 in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage. The impulse I record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not translated into English, and all are prohibited for political reasons in Russia). The man was a central European, the anonymous nymphet was French, and the loci were Paris and Provence. I had him marry the little girl's sick mother who soon died, and after a thwarted attempt to take advantage of the orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was his name) threw himself under the wheels of a truck. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends—Mark Aldanov, two social revolutionaries, and a woman doctor; but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940. (“On a Book Entitled Lolita,” 1956)
The title of Lolita's Russian precursor was Volshebnik ("The Enchanter"). It brings to mind The Enchantress, R. L. Stevenson's lost story that was first published only in 1989. The Scientific Ape is a humorous story by R. L. Stevenson. Describing his first road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert mentions R. L. Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano:
Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit. Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain. Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12 free, Lo a young captive. A collection of a local lady’s homemade sculptures, closed on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere, hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers. Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy years ago. Fish hatcheries. Cliff dwellings. The mummy of a child (Florentine Bea’s Indian contemporary). Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other vide that tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper - "Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them, please" - let’s talk to them, reader! - "please! I’ll do anything you want, oh, please…”). Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company. Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child. A lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an active Adam’s apple, ogling Lo and her orange-brown bare midriff, which I kissed five minutes later, Jack. Winter in the desert, spring in the foothills, almonds in bloom. Reno, a dreary town in Nevada, with a nightlife said to be “cosmopolitan and mature.” A winery in California, with a church built in the shape of a wine barrel. Death Valley. Scotty’s Castle. Works of Art collected by one Rogers over a period of years. The ugly villas of handsome actresses. R. L. Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano. Mission Dolores: good title for book. Surf-carved sandstone festoons. A man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park. Blue, blue Crater Lake. A fish hatchery in Idaho and the State Penitentiary. Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion. A herd of antelopes in a wildlife refuge. Our hundredth cavern, adults one dollar, Lolita fifty cents. A chateau built by a French marquess in N. D. The Corn Palace in S. D.; and the huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite. The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single. A zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship. Billions of dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore. Fat gulls on big stones as seen from the ferry City of Cheboygan, whose brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer. Lincoln’s home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings. (2.2)