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Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her -- as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.

This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called "Dolorès Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone age at heart; up to date, or at least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome, very ripe actress with huge lashes and a pulpy red underlip, endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young scholars dote on plenty of pleats -- que c'était loin, tout cela! It is your hostess' duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. All of us have known "pickers"-- one who picks her cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly or very important, a man should remove his gloves before shaking hands with a woman. Invite Romance by wearing the Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims turns, nips hips. Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps flap. Glamourize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et moi qui t'offrais mon génie… I recalled the rather charming nonsense verse I used to write her when she was a child: "nonsense," she used to say mockingly, "is correct."

Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.

Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.

The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits

The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets…

It is just possible that had I gone to a strong hypnotist he might have extracted from me and arrayed in a logical pattern certain chance memories that I have threaded through my book with considerably more ostentation than they present themselves with to my mind even now when I know what to seek in the past. At the time I felt I was merely losing contact with reality; and after spending the rest of the winter and most of the following spring in a Quebec sanatorium where I had stayed before, I resolved first to settle some affairs of mine in New York and then to proceed to California for a thorough search there.

Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949, I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair of old sneakers, a boy's shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans I found in the trunk compartment, a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures. Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected these sundry belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley -- a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes -- and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border.

(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts, And I, in my corner, snarlin').

Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,

Why are you hiding, darling?

Happy, happy is gnarled McFate

Touring the States with a child wife,

Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.

Are you still dancin', darlin'?

Here is something I composed in my retreat:

And never closed when I kissed her.

Profession: none, or "starlet."

Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,

Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?

Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?

Among the protected wild life.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.

Still one of those blue-caped star-men?

What make is the magic carpet?

And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!

Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!

Plowing his Molly in every State

Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?

Age: five thousand three hundred days.

(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze, I cannot get out, said the starling).

Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?

Are you from Paris, mister?

And where are you parked, my car pet?

And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.

Dolores Haze and her lover!

Of hate and remorse, I'm dying.

And her name is Haze, Dolores.

Officer, officer, there they are --

My car is limping, Dolores Haze,

Officer, officer, there they go --

Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.

Now tumble out, and take cover.

Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?

And again I hear you crying.

L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita:

And the last long lap is the hardest,

With a height of sixty inches.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

And again my hairy fist I raise,

Ninety pounds is all she weighs

By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge.

In the rain, where that lighted store is!

Whip out your gun and follow that car.

Son félé-- bien fol est qui s'y fie!

Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita!

And her socks are white, and I love her so.

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,

I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet's limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita's handmaids and rosegirls. But one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into Lolita's sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time being at least. On the other hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence had left me with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I lived in might drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when confronted with a chance temptation in some lane between school and supper. Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ. This is how Rita enters the picture.