The cross-country road trip

The cross-country road trip, spanning from August 1947 to August 1948, constitutes the central, sustained ordeal of Humbert Humbert's possession of Dolores Haze. Covering approximately 27,000 miles and costing around 8,000 to 10,000 dollars, this year of relentless motion was not a vacation but a calculated strategy of isolation, control, and concealment. Humbert, having retrieved Lolita from Camp Q after Charlotte Haze's sudden death, embarked on a journey that would take them through every region of the continental United States, from New England to the Pacific, and back east to the college town of Beardsley. The trip was a desperate attempt to keep Lolita in a state of dependent submission, a mobile prison where the constant change of scenery was meant to prevent her from forming attachments or seeking help, while Humbert indulged his obsession under the guise of a widowed father and his daughter on a grand tour.

Itinerary and Logistics

The journey began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, dipped deep into Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there, veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts, crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where they wintered, reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads, almost reached the Canadian border, and proceeded east across good lands and bad lands back to agriculture on a grand scale, finally petering out in Beardsley. Humbert preferred the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks ideal for sleep, argument, reconciliation, and insatiable illicit love. He would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each containing a double bed, though the incomplete partition offered only a pharisaic parody of privacy. They came to know the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, the log kind finished in knotty pine, and the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins with their faint sewerish smell. They learned the would-be enticements of repetitious names: all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts. The baths were mostly tiled showers with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, all sharing a propensity to turn instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold depending on whether a neighbor turned on his cold or his hot. Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilet asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices under glass such as Things to Do. They avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones, old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables in depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms and photographs of the landlady's children in all their instars. Humbert would surrender, now and then, to Lolita's predilection for real hotels, which she would pick out in the tour book while he petted her in the parked car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed, mysterious side-road. These highly recommended lake lodges offered all sorts of things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them, such as congenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues, but in Humbert's mind conjured up odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweatshirts and an ember-red cheek pressing against hers. Most empty to her, too, were those Colonial Inns which apart from gracious atmosphere and picture windows promised unlimited quantities of M-m-m food. Humbert's treasured recollections of his father's palatial Hotel Mirana sometimes led him to seek for its like, but he was soon discouraged. He derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free. On the other hand, he shuddered when recalling a soidisant high-class resort in a Midwestern state which advertised raid-the-icebox midnight snacks and, intrigued by his accent, wanted to know his dead wife's and dead mother's maiden names; a two-days' stay there cost him a hundred and twenty-four dollars.

Daily Life and Control

Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts, Lolita would set the electric fan a-whirr, or induce Humbert to drop a quarter into the radio, or read all the signs and inquire with a whine why she could not go riding up some advertised trail or swimming in that local pool of warm mineral water. Most often, in the slouching, bored way she cultivated, she would fall prostrate and abominably desirable into a red springchair or a green chaise longue, or a steamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and canopy, or a sling chair, or any other lawn chair under a garden umbrella on the patio, and it would take hours of blandishments, threats and promises to make her lend him for a few seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room before undertaking anything she might prefer to his poor joy. Humbert found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl: sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. He fed countless nickels to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal, still hearing the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex. She believed with a kind of celestial trust any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land. If a roadside sign said Visit Our Gift Shop, they had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words novelties and souvenirs simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. She attempted to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads. To keep her in submission and passable temper, Humbert relied on three methods: the threat of exile to a dilapidated Appalachian farmhouse she loathed, the reformatory threat of being institutionalized if she complained to the police, and the constant creation of expectations—some specific point in space and time for her to look forward to, to survive till bedtime. The object in view might be anything—a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a café, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort—but it had to be there, in front of them, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lolita would feign gagging as soon as they got to it. By putting the geography of the United States into motion, Humbert did his best for hours on end to give her the impression of going places, of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. He had never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before them, across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously they consumed those long highways, in rapt silence gliding over their glossy black dance floors. Not only did Lolita have no eye for scenery, but she furiously resented his calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape, which Humbert himself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of their undeserving journey.

Jealousy and Surveillance

Humbert had to keep a very sharp eye on Lolita. Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence that might have tickled his pride had it not incensed his jealousy. Little Lolita was aware of that glow, and Humbert would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some amiable male, some grease monkey with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist. Hardly had he turned his back to go and buy her a lollipop than he would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks. When, during longer stops, Humbert would relax after a particularly violent morning in bed and allow her to visit the rose garden or children's library across the street with a motor court neighbor's plain little Mary and Mary's eight-year-old brother, Lolita would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling, golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. Humbert remembered the first time he let her go to a roller-skating rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if he accompanied her, since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. They wrangled out a compromise: he remained in the car, among other empty cars with their noses to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most of the other girls did. Humbert kept counting the revolutions of the rolling crowd—and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was together with three hoodlums whom he had heard analyze a moment before the girl skaters from the outside and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who had arrived clad in red shorts. At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or California, a policeman's cousin would peer with such intensity at them that Humbert's poor heart wobbled. Any honey? the officer would inquire, and every time his sweet fool giggled. Humbert still had, vibrating all along his optic nerve, visions of Lolita on horseback, a link in the chain of a guided trip along a bridle trail: Lolita bobbing at a walking pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous red-necked dude-rancher behind, and Humbert behind him, hating his fat flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a slow truck on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, he would see her floating away from him, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her. In whatever town they stopped, Humbert would inquire, in his polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling and twitching a little—a tic nerveux that cruel Lolita was the first to mimic—he would park at a strategic point, with his vagrant schoolgirl beside him in the car, to watch the children leave school, always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore his so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people's whims, she would insult him and his desire to have her caress him while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun.

The Landscape of Imprisonment

The American landscape itself became a paradoxical backdrop to Humbert's paradise, whose skies were the color of hell-flames. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to Humbert something he accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bedtime with the rustic green views they depicted—opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer he came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward them to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user of roadside facilities, Humbert's unfastidious Lolita would be charmed by toilet signs—Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's—while lost in an artist's dream, Humbert would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out, scarred but still untamed, from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it. At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lolita would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a furnace when they got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as they pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called sage brush appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet them with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway, in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position cutting across all human rules of traffic.

The End of the Journey

The journey ended in Beardsley, where Humbert enrolled Lolita in the Beardsley School, hoping that a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl's day would improve their situation. But the year of travel had left its mark. Humbert caught himself thinking that their long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to them than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment he feigned sleep. The road trip, which had begun as a desperate bid to secure his possession of Lolita, ultimately became the very medium of her loss, as the constant motion and the parade of motels and tourist traps only deepened her alienation and prepared the ground for her eventual escape with Clare Quilty.