PAST MASTERS: VLADIMIR NABOKOV

LO LOVE, HIGH ROMANCE

Poised and trim in midshelf among its distinguished, self-assured, and sometimes overweight family of Nabokovs, “Lolita” has kept its paradoxical allure even in middle age, perpetually inviting us for a return visit. With a new movie version about to open in England and France, and waiting in the wings for an American distributor—Jeremy Irons has taken on the Humbert role, which was played with such classic understatement by James Mason in the 1962 film by Stanley Kubrick—there will never be a better moment to go back to the elegant, uneasily beautiful novel itself and ask ourselves again what the author could have had in mind. If we feel cautious about a reunion, it cannot be from doubt about the merits of this horrific comic masterpiece, or even from an urge to preserve those splashings of pleasure and surprise that came with an unforgotten first reading. Rather, there may be an unwillingness to subject our numbed contemporary responses to these once notorious doings. It would be an almost incommensurable loss if the tale had turned docile because its famous and deplorable theme—the double seduction of twelve-year-old Dolores, or Lolita, Haze, subteen incarnate, by her suave and pederastic European stepfather, Humbert Humbert, and (it turns out) of him by her, Hum by Lo—now felt only like another sedative shocker or case history on the talk-show circuit.

We look on these matters differently now, to put it mildly. Monster child molesters, just sentenced or about to be released from custody, are the subject of mall demonstrations and gloomy op-ed musings, while book reviews invite us to pay attention to the latest true-life confession, sometimes given the soft backlighting of fiction, about somebody’s charmingly concupiscent dad or the restored memories of another miserably suppressed and fumbled-over childhood. It’s not much of a stretch to envision Humbert and Lolita, each in Reeboks, sitting side by side onstage at “The Jenny Jones Show” and proudly staring out at us from the screen (he is wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey) while the giveaway headlines appear in turn beneath them in the close-ups: “Has sex with his late wife’s kiddie daughter” and “He doesn’t know she’s been doing it with her drama teacher.” In no time, the stage will be stuffed with other, almost identical couples, each proclaiming a similar creepy proclivity and prepared to shout back at the tauntings of the titillated but never quite shocked studio audience.

Conspicuous by rumor long before it saw print, “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s twelfth novel, was turned down, on content, by four American publishers before its initial publication, in 1955, by the Olympia Press, in Paris. When Putnam brought it out here, in August, 1958, it already bore a postscript by the author, commenting with brisk pleasure on the disappointment of some readers who had become bored when its erotic early scenes were not continued or amplified in the tale, and on the letdown of others who found “no moral in tow.” Critical response in this country was, well, tense, ranging from brave lit crit (Harvard’s Harry Levin saw the book as “a symbol of the aging European intellectual coming to America, falling in love with it but finding it, sadly, a little immature”) to sounds of vein-swelling outrage (the Times’ Orville Prescott, in a famous venting, called it repulsive, and “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion”—a notice, of course, that may have served as starter’s pistol for the book’s bolt to the front of the best-seller lists, where it stayed for six months).

Other readers’ reactions back then, including my own, reflected a struggle between a private, perhaps unconscious anguish over the story’s sexual complexity and a dazzled admiration for its satiric brilliance and literary weight. Katharine White, Nabokov’s longtime editor at The New Yorker, told him in a letter that, as one with five potential nymphets in the family, including “a golden-skinned, thin-armed nine-year-old,” she had been made “thoroughly miserable” by the book, in spite of her recognition of its virtuosity. Apparently, no consideration was given to publishing “Lolita” in the magazine, in whole or in part, and Nabokov had been specific in his instructions to White that the typescript he had sent her not be shown to William Shawn, the editor. A reflexive protection of Shawn’s supposedly delicate feelings—this time by an author, of all people—was almost customary practice, but this example appears peculiar from a distance, since it was The New Yorker’s own thoughtful and unstintingly appreciative review of the book, commissioned by Shawn and written by the late Donald Malcolm (and published in November, 1958), that Nabokov declared to be his own favorite. Nothing about “Lolita,” then or now, is free of irony.

Responding to the anxious “Why did Nabokov do it?” question of that day, Malcolm proposed that “the artistic (as against the clinical) interest of the novel is all the justification its story requires,” and the book, even when it is read for a second or third time, still refreshes and startles with its inundating flow of high invention: Humbert, the cosmopolitan pervert and logomath, self-presented, with personal history, first marriage, and fatal predilection attached; “nymphet” defined and personified (what other new word and anarchic concept has slithered as swiftly into the language?); the separate deaths of Humbert and Lolita announced, disconcertingly, in the italics of a foreword; a murderee, the evanescent Quilty, identified as if by accident; and so on. Humbert, ensconced chez Haze in small-town America, groans and quivers at each gesture of his inamorata, the unremarkable pubescent Dolores, for he has incarnated in her an avid lost predecessor from his childhood. Almost as an aside, he marries the child’s widowed mother, the over-available Charlotte (it is a means of holding on to his ghastly perch), and, after barely averting a clumsy uxoricide, is miraculously set free—the rest of the story leaps into view at the same instant, Mom and the whole social order done in at the same stroke—by a tiny street accident. Toying with us, the author-plotter gives four careful pages to planning the almost perfect drowning of Charlotte before changing his mind (“The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime”), and then offs her, by passing Packard, in a paragraph. These first hundred-odd pages of “Lolita” are a soap and a half.

If the infamous erotic passage (Humbert robed and aflame in purple silk dressing gown, with the sunburned girleen, all apple and indolence, half lying upon him on a shared davenport) has lost any of its reptilian allure, it is because of its own celebrity: “There she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.”

Nabokov’s first and best joke was this tactical coup of placing himself within the first person of Humbert, from which vantage he is free to boast and confess, interrupt and explain, to lecture, to double back, to evoke, to pant and bemoan, and, generally, to set loose an ironic playfulness that deepens and disarms horror. In “The Magician,” an earlier, never published short-story version of the same basic situation, Nabokov clung to the third person and did not arrive at the debauching of the child until the final pages, after which his pre-Humbertian protagonist, called Arthur, threw himself under the wheels of a truck. Missing was the lyrical exuberance, the incautious “I,” that sets the novel free in its very first lines: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Early readers who were scandalized by Humbert’s furtive Sunday-morning spasm must have been baffled by the author-seducer’s advance invitation to “participate” in the drama and to “see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with…‘impartial sympathy.’ ” He has us there; even today, the paradox defies us, breathtaking and awful even as we watch it coming and understand how it has been brought about. How can we loathe this creature while his keeper stands there smiling beside him, or within him, sardonically in charge? How can we dismiss the one or hope to go on without the other?

Games are central to the novel, but I think we are a little more at ease with Nabokov’s prodigious brightness today, and, now that a couple of generations of grad-school section men have had at the work, perhaps more free simply to enjoy whichever figures and cryptic messages swim up to us from within the patterned and enigmatical text. We no longer feel the need to test ourselves or top each other, I mean, and can settle for a cheerful pass-fail. For me, the author’s joyfulness often matters more than his oracular gifts. Although I was tickled to spot the villain’s name hiding within the murmuration of “comme le lac est beau car faut qu’il t’y mène,” and was startled when the recurrent minor character Vivian Darkbloom, this time glimpsed as “the bare shoulders of a hawk-like, black-haired, strikingly tall woman,” became the author himself, anagrammatized and in drag, I took almost more pleasure in some direct hits: the brusque, two-word expunging of Humbert’s mother within a parenthesis “(picnic, lightning)”; or “a row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough”; or a Nabokovian hydrant—“a hideous thing, really…extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains.”

Most of the ironic riffs have kept their zing—stepdad Humbert, reading up on the difficult teen years in a book called “Know Your Own Daughter,” or the unforgettably awful Miss Pratt, a school principal, discussing the sexual-maturing process with the appalled (appalled by jargon) Hum. But the author’s celebrated connoisseurish observations of the American roadside encampments where the guilty couple pause or sleep over during their travels, with “the would-be enticements of their repetitious names—all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts” (what a gourmandish, Continental relish Nabokov took in their listing and naming), feel dated and sadly sweetened today. Had we been as medianed, I-95’d, and Best Westernized back then as we are now, where would our weird lovers and their master have found their rest?

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ITS APEX OF IRONY traversed at the instant when the captive child, whispering in the debaucher’s ear, lets him know that she has been there and done that (“For quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting”), “Lolita” now shifts beneath our feet and becomes a different story altogether. Humbert, given his way, becomes obsessed not with passion but with the anxiety of the mundane. During their year of travels, a coast-to-coast-and-back, twenty-seven-thousand-mile hegira of burgers and wilderness, “cottage-cheese-crested salads” and backwater burgs, he must protect their drab secret by enlisting Lo as a co-conspirator and, in addition, must see to it that his depraved darling is fed and entertained and kept in passable temper—kept as companion as well as paramour—and, within limits, also permitted to be herself, act her age. Not surprisingly, he finds her brattish and exasperating, “a disgustingly conventional little girl,” subject to “fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off.” In no time, she turns idly whorish, too, enhancing her allowance by the blackmail of withheld sexual favors. “There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child,” Humbert sighs. Embarrassed, he finds it necessary to apologize to the reader for his unexpected fall from pure lust, and insists that “in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness.”

More is going on here than dark comedy or a farcical switching of sympathies, for Humbert has been visited not just with a hellish particularity but with the deeper affliction of recognizing truth. Late at night, feigning sleep, he hears Lolita weeping in the dark, and must admit as well that “it had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.” Lionel Trilling wrote, “Less and less is it a situation that we see [in “Lolita”]; what we become aware of is people. Humbert is perfectly willing to say that he is a monster; we find ourselves less and less eager to agree with him.”

Nabokov’s elusiveness, it dawns on us, is not just playful. Forever changing sides and withholding judgment, he has contrived to forestall both our outrage at his nasty hero and our contemptuous dismissal of his trivial, complicit Juliet. His irony is never patronizing or angry, and for this alone he appears—what shall we call it?—premodern in his patient seriousness and relentless search for another level. Almost ruefully, we sense that by reserving some fragment of sympathy for readers who saw their own daughters or granddaughters or friends’ daughters personified in Dolores and still wanted them innocent, we have insisted on a type, while denying evidence of the possible; there is the thrill of adventure in this shift within ourselves, however oddly and painfully it has come to pass. Nobody was ever seduced by a book, Jimmy Walker is believed to have said, but that was before Lo.

For me, what happens midstream in “Lolita”—just before her elopement with the evil and offstage Quilty—is an even more indelible business than the deepening madness of the later pages, with that recapitulative, spellbound return tour by Humbert of the haunted motels and hamlets he had frequented with Lo, and the dreamlike assassination of Quilty, visible at last and intolerably loquacious even as he is being shot down and repunctured during his operatic end. What I go back to is a passage where Dolores, a bit older now, is playing tennis, Hum-watched with such intensity that nothing else matters: “My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arms and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended.” On and on he goes for a page, then another page, of on-court Lo (“her nimble, vivid, white-shod feet”; “the polished gem of her dropshot”), an absurd sportswriter who even envisions her at Wimbledon one day, along with “her gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert.” Almost before he says it, we know what has happened. “Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?” The moment is sealed with a Nabokovian flourish: “An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.”

No one can be more reluctant than I to search out a weightier, less playful substratum in a work of sustained comic pleasure, but we are in the proprietor’s hands here, and there appears to be little doubt about his intentions. For all its glittering distractions and diversions, this is a love story, after all—an unexpected grand romance, with a poignance and conviction that match anything in our old box of American valentines: “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Age of Innocence,” “Ethan Frome,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Sister Carrie,” “The Great Gatsby,” and more. Eloquent Humbert is alone at the end, and all his joys have become heartbreaking and ridiculous. A persistent sadness infects what has gone before and what will come next. The given condition of “Lolita,” one unexpectedly recalls, is that we have been permitted to read this story only because both lovers are dead: the child Dolores is to die of her child, die while giving birth, and Humbert will succumb to coronary thrombosis, a broken heart.

Another three years must go by, late in the book, before Humbert, still on the trail of Quilty, finds his lost Dolores—Dolly Schiller now, pregnant and married to a luckless young mechanic. No matter: “There she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits…. I looked at her and looked at her, and knew as dearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.” And: “Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio?”

He offers her money, four thousand dollars, for her missed trousseau, and unhesitatingly asks her to leave with him—leave on the spot, come as she is and live happily ever after. She can’t believe the money and she can’t believe him. “No,” she says, turning him down. “No, honey, no.” It is her first endearment—almost the first time, come to think of it, that she has noticed him at all—and perhaps the first moment that we see him clear. This is the Humbert we once recoiled from while he masturbated over a purloined sock belonging to the child Lo, but we can forgive him now, perhaps even tearily, because we recognize that it is not obsession but delusion that has brought him down—the oldest delusion in the world but one we have all suffered from at one time or another, and, with any luck, may fall victim to again any day now.

Books, August, 1997