“Nothing is out of reach”
I came to Lolita indirectly, through my sister, who read a lot of interesting humor writing when we were kids. When she was around fourteen and I was eleven or so, she was reading Cold Comfort Farm and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. One of Jean Kerr’s pieces in The Snake Has All the Lines imagines a magazine feature called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” if the couple were Humbert Humbert and Lolita.
I’m eleven and living in Baltimore, which means much of my life involves working backward without context. I don’t know who Lolita is. I don’t know what this is or why a column would be called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” There were so many pop culture references that I didn’t get. I lived in an old-fashioned world. I was laughing the other day because I still use the term “Fibber McGee’s closet.” No one says that anymore!
I connected the dots as I found them. I read this piece in my sister’s book and I didn’t get it, but what I did infer from it is that Lolita is a terrifically dirty book. I loved dirt. I still do. I loved dirty books when I was a kid and I was constantly on the lookout for the dirtiest books I could find. We kind of blame my mom, because she would read, say, Valley of the Dolls and hide it in the linen closet. Of course my sister found it, and she would go into this old-fashioned walk-in closet and stand there and read.
We were both avid for information from the adult world, and we thought we were getting it from books like Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place. As we got older, in the 1970s, there were just so many terrifically nasty, dirty, smutty books. When I finally got my hands on Lolita, I was so disappointed at the lack of dirty parts.
However, the book stayed with me, and it’s one I’ve gone back to again and again. It’s a novel that forces you to ask yourself if certain subjects are taboo. Many smart, even scholarly people have said the book now makes them uncomfortable, because they don’t believe that Nabokov could have known what he did about pedophilia if he did not have experience with it, or at the very least, suppressed desires.
That bothers me. I write about pretty horrific stuff. I wouldn’t want people to draw the conclusion that because I imagine that stuff, I have experience with it, or suppressed desires to maim and kill and so on.
Also, I have reread Lolita fairly recently, and one of the things I think it’s important to recognize is that this is a work written by one of the masters of the novel, someone who used language superbly. It’s hard to believe there’s a single unconsidered word or device in it, and so when I come to the moment where Nabokov breaks the “fourth wall” and lets Humbert slip that Lolita cries in the night, every night—that shows me that the author is letting you in on the fact that he understands the horror of what is happening, that Lolita, for all the sophistication Humbert believes he sees, is a little girl who cries in the bathroom every night.
That lets me know that as readers we were never supposed to lose sight of what was being done, that this is a child being violated. Humbert Humbert is wrong. Everything he offers up about himself and in his defense is erroneous.
So I think it’s a book that can still be read. If a novelist thinks very hard about something and invests her full imagination into it, nothing is out of reach. It’s interesting how little people talk about and value their imaginations. Whenever I meet someone who says, “I have no imagination,” I ask, “What would do you if you won the lottery?” Everyone has an imagination, and although it may become a bit more reality bound as we grow older, peering inside someone else’s imagination is always possible. Who could I have less in common with than Humbert Humbert? Yet through Nabokov’s imaginative powers I am drawn into his story. His story—not Lolita’s. I hope someday someone writes that one.
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Laura Lippman is an award-winning, bestselling novelist whose works, including the Tess Monaghan detective series, often center around her home city of Baltimore, where she lives with her husband and daughter.