Reveries.....new starts.
When last we saw Arthur -- his new name -- he was grappling with his conscience. HAH! Is
that ever an abuse of the language!
Previous pleasant memories came to him. And what to do? What to do?
"These had been pitiful hurried moments, separated by years of roaming and searching, yet he would have paid anything for any one of them......yet how many times, on a shabby lawn, a vulgar city bus, or on some seaside sand useful only as food for an hourglass, he had been betrayed by a grim hasty choice, his entreaties had been ignored by chance, and the delight of his eyes interrupted by a heedless turn of events.
Thin, dry-lipped with a balding head and ever watchful eyes, he now seated himself on a bench in a city park. July abolished the clouds, and a minute later he put on the hat he had been holding in his white slender-fingered hands.
The spider waits, the heartbeat stops."
And the line stuns!
For all I know, that is the only time in all of literature that the mere act of a man putting on a hat leads to 'the spider waits.'
He simply put on his hat, and did
nothing else! But suddenly 'the spider waits.'
There are several such abrupt segues in the story, and they move it forward in abrupt leaps, almost as if discontinuously. But when I reread them, they are not tears in the canvas. Instead, they are masterful bridges. They work! They work! At least for me.
And just there, it is as if the artist decided that the calm picture he was painting needed a dash of black, just.....right.... ..there! And with a single continuous stroke he brushed it on.
Arthur finds a coin. The lady to his right remarks that it is good luck,
"And at this point the curtain rises.
A violet-clad girl of twelve (he never erred) was treading rapidly and firmly on skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight."
We the readers are then treated to a full paragraph desription of her appearance (something we never really got for Lolita)
..all of her from tip to toe: the liveliness of her russet curls .... [down to] ... the coarse straps of the skates."
And imagine!
"....a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armored foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap on her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb, next to my chameleonic cheek."
But NO! Stop! That's a different book! It is
Lolita(p20)!
How can that be?!
It is as if two movie crews were shooting scenes from
Enchanter and
Lolita on different benches in the same park, and the girl merely skated from the one bench, when she was done there, over to the other! But with one vital difference. In
Lolita, she was merely
A Girl; in
The Enchanter she is
THE Girl making her appearance!
A lawn?
City bus?
Seaside sand?
Interrupted?
Roller skates?
Russet curls?
Variable sunlight?
All in a dozen or so lines of
Enchanter text! Aaah.
The predecessor to
Lolita? You bet!
Peder
