a fan's notes
"Bunny Sue was the consummation of many long months of incredible, nearly unspeakable apprehension -- months in which I had, like the mad Kinbote, lived my life in exile, waiting to sail back and recover my lost kingdom of Zembla. That kingdom was always a 'dim iridescence' -- a place above and beyond the next precipice; but I always knew that at any moment, the very next no doubt, the world's colors would fall into place and define themselves."
"She was Hudson's Rima, Spenser's Una, Humbert Humbert's Dolly. She was the scarcely pubescent girl modeling the Chesterfield coat in Seventeen, resting on the haunch of one leg, the toe of the pump of the free leg aimed squarely at the firmament, suggesting that place was no less than her destination. She was Wordsworth's Lucy, Tristan's Iseult, Poe's Annabel Lee."
"I say somnambulant, by which I mean that at least I was; even today I find it incredible to believe that she, Miss America, in the end, as Lolita did to poor, poor Humbert Humbert, seduced -- or should I say tried to seduce? -- me. At the apartment I broke one of the snifter glasses and we shared a drink from the remaining one."
"Miss America, it seems, was a Lolita after all and had been indulging herself, with a remarkable lack of discrimination, since a high school fullback had taken her at a scarcely pubescent fourteen. I heard all the names after that, Tom and Dick and Harry, and all the sordid details, and eyes avoiding hers continued to smile in that painful way."
"Occupying and making my headquarters in red-leather booth Number 1 of a heavy-beamed, mahogany-lined bar, I was a kind of intellectually aloof Toots Shor and inaccessible to all but a chosen few: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Edmund Wilson, Lee Remick, John Cheever, Sophia Loren, Vladimir Nabokov, Ingrid Bergman, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and some select others."
"The girl was invariably knock-kneed but a young and shy and brave and lovely little thing, and I used to lie on the davenport trying to concentrate on Humbert Humbert's searing avowals of love while overhearing the joyous and erotic laughter from the adjoining suite, used to lie there dying of longing, envy, and boredom."
"Winking as lasciviously as ever any of the men had, she nodded in the direction of Lolita, clutched open and cover face up against my chest, and with a great sigh remarked to me the book's alarming sexuality. That sigh was wrought with heavy sensuality, as though merely calling back the huge and lustful appetites of the book's characters all but prostrated her with fatigue. She was the only one who had so far spoken to me, I liked her intelligent looks and fine legs, I pitied her the fake sophistication of her predicament, and I should have accepted her pleasantry for what it was. But I was by then drunk on Nabokov's prose and loathed her facile misreading of the author's intentions.
"'Quite the contrary,' I said. 'Lolita is about as sexy as Little Women.'
"My tone was tendentious and abrupt, and though she came often afterward, she never spoke again. Her mon-cher barrister, a black-tied, horn-rimmed, hairy-nosed, and towering old fraud (as might be expected, he was, I later learned, very good at The Law), continued to speak, invariably remarking his wonder that I was still 'on Lolita.' He'd wag his horn-rimmed head, smile secretively, wink, and proclaim his astonishment: 'Still on Lolita?' Then he'd issue a past master's chuckle by way of letting me know that he and I were joined in some scatological conspiracy. It never occurred to him that I might be reading the book for the fourth or fifth time, and as the days passed I know he came to regard me as either depraved or the most moronic reader in Christendom. 'Still on Lolita!' became a recurring din, like a daily summons to waken. In response, I gave up nodding my moronic assent and to please him came after a time to feign utter cretinism. He'd shout, and prior to answering I'd knit my brow into a painful knot and fake a tortured reading, zealously and gropingly forming 'all them hard words' with my mouth. 'It's kinda hard reading,' I'd say. 'It is, huh?' he'd shout, solicitously steering his paramour toward the boudoir. Eventually they both came to view me with that compassion one reserves for burlapped monks and homely girls. 'Really hard reading!' I'd exclaim as the door was closing in preparation to their erotic play. Then I would hear them giggle and had a grand time envisioning them wagging their superior heads in sympathy with my driveling addleheadedness."
"The straight-legged girl and her hairy-nosed attorney continued to come to the apartment; he continued to wink lasciviously and remark his wonder that I was still on Lolita."
"...I looked up to see the gray-flanneled, horn-rimmed attorney who had registered such surprise at my endless lip-reading of Lolita."
- More information on Frederick Exley.
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