1950

By 1950, Humbert Humbert had lost all trace of Dolores Haze and her abductor, Clare Quilty. The cross-country search that had consumed him since her disappearance from the Elphinstone hospital in the summer of 1949 had yielded nothing but a trail of mocking pseudonyms and dead ends. The fury and despair that had driven him across the continent began to curdle into a dangerous solitude. It was in this state, somewhere between Montreal and New York, that he picked up Rita, a woman who would become his companion for the next two years.

Rita: A Companion in the Void

Rita was twice Lolita's age and three-quarters of Humbert's, a slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes and a rapidly sketched profile. Humbert found her one depraved May evening at a bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk and insisted they had gone to school together. She placed her trembling little hand on his ape paw. Though his senses were only very slightly stirred, he decided to give her a try and adopted her as a constant companion. She was, he reflects, so kind and such a good sport that she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy—an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine—out of sheer chumminess and compassion. Her brother, a prominent politician and mayor of Grainball City, paid her several hundred dollars a month under the stringent condition that she never enter that town. Rita had recently divorced her third husband and been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant; the others were too numerous and mobile to tabulate.

Life on the Road and in New York

Humbert and Rita cruised together for two dim years, from the summer of 1950 to the summer of 1952. She had a natty little coup, and in it they traveled to California, giving Humbert's venerable vehicle a rest. Her natural speed was ninety. Humbert found her the sweetest, simplest, gentlest, dumbest Rita imaginable. In comparison to her, he notes, Valeria was a Schlegel and Charlotte a Hegel. He credits her with saving him from the madhouse. He told her he was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully, and Rita solemnly approved of the plan. In the course of some investigation she undertook on her own around San Humbertino, she got entangled with a pretty awful crook, and Humbert had the devil of a time retrieving her—used and bruised but still cocky. The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, and her slow languorous columbine kisses kept him from mischief. One afternoon, in a hideous hotel, they awoke to find a blond, almost albino young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears snoring on their bed, whom neither recalled ever having seen. They rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that they were in Grainball. This incident started a chain of ideas that resulted in Humbert publishing an essay on "Mimir and Memory" in the Cantrip Review.

The Cantrip Interlude and Rita's Disappearance

In result of this venture, Humbert was called from New York, where he and Rita were living in a little flat with a view of Central Park, to Cantrip College for one year. He lodged there in special apartments for poets and philosophers from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita, whom he preferred not to display, vegetated somewhat indecorously in a roadside inn where he visited her twice a week. Then she vanished—more humanly than her predecessor had done. A month later he found her in the local jail. She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince him that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. Humbert succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards they drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where they stopped for a few hours. A curious urge to relive his stay there with Lolita had got hold of him. He was entering a phase of existence where he had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her. He now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir.

The End of the Rita Years

In late September 1952, Humbert received a letter from John Farlow that was hysterical in tone, informing him that busybodies had reported the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown and that he was living with a notorious divorcee in California. That same mail brought another letter, this one from Dolores Haze herself, now married and pregnant. Humbert left Rita forever, with a note of tender adieu taped to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. He glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and kissed her on her moist brow. The two-year interlude with Rita was over, and the final, violent chapter of his story was about to begin.