Zadie Smith writes in Changing My Mind (2009):
Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of Lolita—it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. (208)
But this does Dolores an injustice, doesn’t it? Dolores Haze does not destroy Humbert, not in any sense at all. To attach to this ordinary girl such power is to deny her truth: that she is powerless in her life—not entirely a victim, because she does have agency—but, relative to the influence of the culture in which she lives and the men who use her (not to mention her mother), she is ineffectual and constrained. The claim, rather, smacks of wish-fulfillment, of an anguished desire to rewrite the novel with Dolores as avenging angel—through her mother, no less—a reading that has been proposed by other critics wishing to grant Charlotte and Dolores secret, subversive powers and a kind of “triumph over tragedy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Humbert injures and abuses Dolores, but he does not destroy her; and, though he laments that she caused him to suffer and ascribes haunting powers to mother and daughter, Dolores was never capable of giving him what he wanted—the “pain of love” he shared with Annabel (15)—and so she was incapable even of denying him, let alone destroying him.
Neither is Humbert destroyed by his obsession. He is consumed with it right up to his death; he lives his “life,” his inspiration, his ecstasy. Nothing, in fact, destroys Humbert; he follows his perverse dream and dies of a heart attack, a pedestrian romantic trope, after he has “immortalized” his love. I hardly call that destruction.
As for the tennis ball, Nabokov would roll in his grave hearing that his attention to detail “just is.” That “old gray tennis ball...on an oak chest” awaits an interested scholar regarding the novel’s “grand themes.”
old gray tennis ball, Grainball & Gray Star in Lolita
The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s "Arlésienne." A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been out-of-doors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, “Is that Monsieur Humbert?” A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herself - sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order - came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette. (1.10)
"I foretell the future. I predict the past. I don't need a crystal ball; a football, a tennis ball, a moth ball, any old ball will do. When the power is upon me, there is no holding me back, I just let loose and prophesy all over the place.” (Brother Theodore, stage name of Theodore Isidore Gottlieb, a German-born American actor and comedian, 1906-2001)
An old gray tennis ball seems to foreshadow Grainball (Rita's brother is the mayor and boaster of Grainball) and Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest where, according to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952:
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.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).
Describing his visit to Coalmont (a small mining town where Lolita, now married to Dick Schiller and big with child, lives with her husband) on September 23, 1952, Humbert mentions Quilty's play Golden Guts:
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his Golden Guts and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that. (2.29)
Lolita tells Humbert that Duk Duk Ranch to which Quilty brought her had burned to the ground. Thirty-seven-year-old Humbert meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and falls in love with her because on the eve McCoo's house was destroyed by fire.
tennis in University Poem; John Ray, Jr. in Lolita
From The University Poem (1927):
Она лениво - значит, скверно -
играла; не летала серной,
как легконогая Ленглен.
Ах, признаюсь, люблю я, други,
на всем разбеге взмах упругий
богини в платье до колен!
Подбросить мяч, назад согнуться,
молниеносно развернуться,
и струнной плоскостью сплеча
скользнуть по темени мяча,
и, ринувшись, ответ свистящий
уничтожительно прервать,-
на свете нет забавы слаще...
В раю мы будем в мяч играть.
Her game was lazy – therefore, bad –
she played; she did not fly, chamois-like,
with the fleet foot of Lenglen.
Oh, I confess, my friends, I love
the stroke resilient at full tilt,
the goddess in a knee-length dress!
To toss the ball, to arch my back,
unwind like lightning,
with the stringed surface, from the shoulder
to skim the ball’s occiput,
and, lunging, the whistling return
to devastatingly cut short –
the world has not a sweeter pastime …
in heaven we shall be playing ball. (34)
V rayu my budem v myach igrat' (in heaven we shall be playing ball) brings to mind John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript).
100% agree that the gray…
100% agree that the gray tennis ball “just is” not. I think that detail could hint at a tangled timeline. Humbert sees the “old gray tennis ball” upon arrival, and later in the book he imagines holding "a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball.” Similarly, on that first day in the Haze home he observes "the brown core of an apple,” and later (before the atrocious lap scene) Dolores holds “a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.” Obviously this is not a fully developed theory yet, but fun to think about! Thanks for your post! - M