July 1947
July 1947 is the fulcrum on which the entire tragedy of Lolita turns. It is the month Humbert Humbert, recently released from a sanatorium and seeking a studious summer in New England, arrives at 342 Lawn Street in Ramsdale and, in a flash of passionate recognition, identifies twelve-year-old Dolores Haze as the reincarnation of his lost childhood love, Annabel Leigh. The thirty days that follow constitute the diary that Humbert calls "exhibit number two" — a record of his escalating obsession, his furtive physical advances, and the single, decisive afternoon on the davenport that, in his mind, makes Lolita his forever, even as it leaves her untouched and unaware.
Arrival and Recognition
Humbert comes to Ramsdale in July 1947 after a "dreadful breakdown" sent him to a sanatorium for more than a year, followed by a second hospitalization. He is seeking a "studious summer" in a sleepy New England town, subsisting on his scholarly notes and bathing in a nearby lake. The plan to lodge with the McCoo family collapses when their house burns down, and he is redirected to the home of Charlotte Haze at 342 Lawn Street. He arrives in a "funeral car" lent by a neighbor, intending to leave immediately for the Bermudas or the Bahamas. But as he follows Charlotte through the dining room toward the garden, he sees, "without the least warning," a child on a mat in a pool of sun: "half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses." The twenty-five years since his adolescent summer with Annabel Leigh "tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished." This is Lolita, and Humbert knows at once that his discovery of her is "a fatal consequence" of that "princedom by the sea" in his tortured past.
The Diary of Obsession
Humbert keeps a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather with a golden "1947" on its cover, recording the days of June after he moves into the Haze house. The entries, which he writes twice — first in pencil on a typewriter tablet, then copied in his smallest hand into the little black book — document his minute observations of Lolita's body and movements. He watches her take clothes off a line in "apple-green light," notes the "silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair," and the "little bone twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle." He describes her "slangy speech," her "harsh high voice," and the way she walks: "a faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall." The diary is a record of his "delectatio morosa" — his doleful days spent in "dumps and dolors" — and of his growing conviction that he can possess her without her knowledge. He notes that he has "all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder." He also records that he is said to resemble some crooner or actor on whom Lo has a crush.
The Davenport Scene
The climax of July 1947 occurs on a Sunday morning in June, when Charlotte has gone to church and Lolita stays home. Humbert, in his purple silk dressing gown, finds her on the living room davenport in a "pretty print dress," holding an apple. She extends her legs across his lap, and he, "in a state of excitement bordering on insanity," begins a series of stealthy movements, talking fast to divert her attention while he performs "the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick." He recites a garbled version of a popular song — "O my Carmen, my little Carmen" — and she corrects him, her voice "musical and applesweet." As she strains to throw the apple core into the fender, her weight shifts in his lap, and he enters "a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body." He achieves a "longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known" while she remains absorbed in her comic, unaware. When the telephone rings, she rolls off the sofa and answers it, and Humbert, "immersed in a euphoria of release," sweeps upstairs to run a bath. He feels "proud of himself" — he has "stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor." The conjurer has poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white purse, and "lo, the purse was intact."
Consequences and Aftermath
The davenport scene is the first of many such "masked caresses" Humbert will perform, but it is also the moment that seals his fate. He believes he has "safely solipsized" Lolita, that she is "another, fanciful Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own." But this delusion is the foundation of the entire tragedy. The diary entries that follow record his growing desperation as Charlotte announces that Lolita will be sent to Camp Q, and Humbert realizes he is about to lose his darling just when he has "secretly made her mine." The month ends with Lolita's departure for camp, and Humbert left alone in the house, his "hollow hand still ivory-full of Lolita." July 1947 is thus the month of first sight, first diary, first consummation — and first loss. It is the seedbed of all that follows: the marriage to Charlotte, the cross-country flight, the years of pursuit, and the murder of Clare Quilty. The month is a compressed universe of Humbert's entire moral and emotional trajectory, from ecstatic recognition to the first intimation of the "horrible hopelessness" that will define his life.
