10

LOLITA

We finished The Metamorphosis in summer 2014. In the fall, I carried on visiting the prison every week, but not for the book club, from which I took a break for a while. As an experiment, I taught a writing class to a mixed group of prisoners and college students. All the men in the book club were enrolled, so I continued to see them regularly, although they were part of a much larger group. Once we got past security, this class was always interesting, but the weekly stress of getting fifteen creatively dressed and plentifully pierced art students past Officer Grubb and through the metal detector caused such damage to my nerves that I don’t plan to repeat the experiment anytime soon.

As the semester came to an end, something unexpected happened; at least, I wasn’t expecting it. The prisoners often told me that their lawyers were renegotiating their sentences, that they’d be getting a new court date at any time now, that next summer they’d be lying on the beach, and so on. Nothing ever came of these predictions, so when Vincent told me he’d be out in November, I didn’t pay much attention. After all, he’d served only a little over thirty years, and however long that might seem, it wasn’t anywhere near the two consecutive life sentences the judge had given him. But what I didn’t know was his lawyer was Howard Cardin, brother of the United States senator for Maryland Ben Cardin, and an attorney with a reputation for performing miracles. (He was Known at JCI as “Go Home” Cardin.) What’s more, Cardin and his team were representing Vincent pro bono, since Cardin was an old friend of Vincent’s father. I was not aware that Cardin had managed to get Vincent’s original two sentences commuted into one, so I was taken by surprise when I returned to the prison in November and learned that Vincent had been released.

Doug, a stately gentleman of sixty-six (and another titan at six feet five inches), took Vincent’s place in the book club. Doug had just got out of the hospital. He’d been suffering from an aortic aneurysm that had caused a leaky heart valve and was on a lot of new medication that was making him very groggy.

As a matter of fact, I’d heard of Doug before I started working in the prison. His was a notorious case in Baltimore history. I live in an old hotel called the Belvedere, and while researching the history of the building I’d come across newspaper accounts of the “Belvedere trunk murder,” a crime that took place in May 1973, when Doug and his coworker Dennis had been managing the then-vacant hotel. Doug was convicted of murdering a local man and concealing his body in a trunk on the basis of testimony from Dennis, with whom the victim was last seen alive. Doug was single-mindedly determined to clear his name. He constantly wrote to local newspapers about his own situation and related legal matters, communicated with various lawyers, and campaigned for reporters to revisit his case. His medical problems had caused a setback in his crusade, but he continued to insist he’d be exonerated before he died. When I first met him, he was awaiting a hearing on newly discovered—and potentially exculpatory—evidence.

DOUG AND MIKITA

Photo of Doug and Mikita by Mark Hejnar.

At JCI, a new money-saving policy had been introduced. Now, every Wednesday, the prison was on “administrative lockdown.” After breakfast, no one was let out of their cells except those men with essential jobs, including those who worked in Dietary. The kitchen workers would prepare lunch and dinner trays, and at mealtimes the prisoners would walk over to the dining hall, pick up a tray, and take it back to their cells. All Wednesday visits, appointments, and meetings were canceled. Fortunately, the warden allowed classes to continue even on lockdown days. Since these weekly lockdowns had been saving the prison a significant amount of money, it looked as though they’d continue indefinitely.

FEBRUARY 26, 2015

Back at JCI, I was pleased to see my old friends again and happy to meet a new one: Luke, J.D.’s new six-month-old black Labrador, who was still partly floppy puppy. J.D. himself was also uncharacteristically floppy. He’d broken his hand playing handball and was taking Percocet to numb the pain. It was, he announced in an unexpectedly loud voice, the first time he’d ever taken a narcotic of any kind. His eyes were wide and he was slumped halfway down in his chair.

“Percocet’s nothing,” said Donald, whose two herniated disks had made him long familiar with both pain and pain medication. Today he made a grand entrance, walking stiffly with the help of a cane. “They’ve got me on methadone now.”

“Is that all they can do for you, just give you drugs to numb the pain?” I asked.

“They’ve tried physical therapy. Now they’re trying pain management. In the end, when they’ve been through everything else, they’re going to have to operate.”

“How do you manage to work in the woodshop if you’re in so much pain?”

“It’s all computerized. I can sit down. Just got to press the right buttons.”

Turk had some news for me. “We’ve had an interesting event the other day,” he told me. “You probably saw it on the news. This guy got steamed to death.”

“Steamed to death?”

“That’s right. I’ll tell you how it happened. His wife, on the outside, she got killed. This guy, he had a breakdown, so they put him on mental health segregation, so called. Stripped him down. You know how cold it’s been this winter, right? It was, like, minus two, three degrees? What I heard was he was asking for a blanket, and they wouldn’t give him one. They think he pulled the top pipe out of the radiator, maybe to get warm, maybe to kill himself, they don’t know. The janitor saw water coming out from under the cell, and he looked in the door and sees this guy on the floor. Anyway, by the time the police got there, the guy was dead.”

“God, how awful.”

“Yeah. He was a real light-complected guy. When they found him, his skin had gone pink. They said it slid right off his body just like soft-shell shrimp.”

“No kidding.”

“That’s what they said,” confirmed Donald.

There was a long pause.

“So, what else is going on?” I asked. “Are you guys taking any courses?”

“I’m taking two,” said Steven. “Criminal Justice and Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare?”

“Yeah. We’ve really been having a lot of fun with it.” Steven gave me his brightest, most wicked grin. “We’re reading Romeo and Juliet and we’ve been acting it all out.”

“Seriously? Are you reading it in the original or in modern English?”

“The original.”

“And you’re enjoying it?”

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “At first a lot of the guys didn’t want to play women’s parts. Then the professor laid down the law. She goes, ‘Look, in Shakespeare’s time, no ladies were allowed on the stage. It was all men. Boys had to play the ladies’ parts. You’re going to have to do the same thing here, so you may as well all get over your shyness right now.’ Donald had gone to the bathroom, and when he came back he found out he was my wife.”

Everyone started to laugh as Steven recalled how Donald found himself in the role of “Mrs. Capulet,” but I was more concerned about the discomfort in my stomach. Was it something I ate? No. I recognized it, although at first I couldn’t tell what it was. It was something I hadn’t felt for a long time. Then I knew: jealousy. I was jealous! “My” men were reading Shakespeare with another teacher. Another female teacher! Not only that, they were reading the text in the original, acting it out, and enjoying it. Shakespeare was my territory! The jealousy lasted for around thirty seconds, at which point it was replaced with a different emotion, equally painful: dismay that I was still capable of such petty resentments. Fortunately, by the time Steven had finished his anecdote, I’d recovered my equilibrium and was back on an even keel.

At least, I thought, no one else but me would dare ask the men to read Lolita, although I still wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I’d changed my mind about it many times. Lolita was a book I loved, but I knew it would be controversial, and I wasn’t even sure if the CO at the gate would let me bring copies into the prison, especially since the cover of the edition I’d chosen was illustrated by a pair of coltish legs emerging from a schoolgirl’s skirt. I needn’t have worried. The guard scarcely gave it a glance, and when I handed out copies to the men, Steven mentioned there was a copy in the “Classics” section of the prison library. That was a huge relief.

The men were all familiar with “Lolita” as a slang term for a sexually precocious young girl, although they didn’t necessarily realize that when the book was first published in 1955, the pedophile wasn’t the familiar demon he’s become today. I’m sure Nabokov would have been shocked to learn that pedophilia would come to be so universally despised that in some places sentences for child rape can be more severe than those for murder (which, some have argued, may encourage such rapists to kill their victims, destroying all evidence of the “more serious” crime).

I first read Lolita in 1989. I spent that summer almost broke, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s dorm room and washing dishes for cash. I saw a copy in a local bookstore—the 1980 British Penguin edition—and was drawn in by the cover. Beneath an alluring quote (“The greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction”) a young girl wearing red heart-shaped sunglasses sucked a red lollipop—an homage to the Kubrick film, I now realize, as Nabokov’s Lolita does neither. As soon as I started reading, I knew I was in the hands of a genius. I was mesmerized. The effect, I later realized, was intentional. Just as Poe meant his tales to evoke the uncanny effect of a séance, Nabokov wanted to cast a spell over his readers. The writer, he declared, had to be “at once a storyteller, a teacher, and, most supremely, an enchanter.”

There was no enchantment in the air, however, the day we began reading Lolita at JCI. The sky outside was gray, and water dripped from the gutter above the classroom onto the compound outside. Maybe it was the miserable weather, but the men seemed apathetic. There was no spark. Everything felt choppy and fractured. Day-Day had to leave early to go to a group called Men of Character. J.D. was too medicated to focus. Donald had forgotten his reading glasses again. At first I thought it was Vincent’s absence that was making things feel off balance. Then I wondered whether the break I’d taken had been too long. Then I noticed something else: the men weren’t sitting in their usual places. The seat they’d saved for me today wasn’t between Charles and Steven, as it had always been until now, but between Nick and Donald. Steven was sitting directly opposite me, on the other side of the room, in between J.D. and Sig. I’m not sure this change of formation was a cause of the difference, or a symptom of it, but it definitely made me feel ill at ease.

Later I wondered whether the slump could be attributed to the fact that, right from the start, the men seemed suspicious of the narrator. About an hour into our session, after reading aloud a description of Humbert Humbert sitting on a park bench under which a little girl is groping for a lost marble, Sig looked up at me with an expression of utter disgust and exclaimed, “This guy’s just an old pedo!”

When I’d imagined reading Lolita with the prisoners—many of whom had committed crimes that might be considered as serious as child rape—I’d thoughtlessly assumed they’d have sympathy for Humbert Humbert as well as for Lolita. I thought they’d see him as a fellow outsider. I’d always believed that anyone who engages fully with Lolita has to understand that a story of what is technically termed “sexual molestation” can also be a deeply moving love story. There’s no “for or against” in Lolita; it’s a portrait of two suffering human beings.

After our first session on Lolita, I saw what I should have seen months ago: that, rather than sympathizing with Humbert Humbert, the men would despise him. I’d learned from reading Junkie that the prisoners wouldn’t necessarily recognize their fictional counterparts, nor did I always expect them to identify with the lawbreaker. In the case of Lolita, however, I’d never considered Humbert to be anything other than an idol. I’ve always had a weakness for eloquent gentleman, and when I first read Lolita, I immediately fell in love with the narrator. Whenever I read the book, Humbert Humbert’s style, humor, and sophistication blind me to his faults. I know that, in prison, pedophiles are considered despicable scum—it was just that I’d never thought of Humbert as a pedophile. And now, poor Humbert—I’d thrown him to a lynch mob. As I drove back to Baltimore, I wondered if the men would refuse to go on reading the book. It hadn’t happened yet, but if they were going to veto any of my choices, this would be the one. The prisoners had a far more passionate sense of justice than I did. The outcast is always looking for someone to throw rocks at.

I’ve always felt immense sympathy for Humbert Humbert. I believe he’s acutely conscious of his failings and painfully aware of the misery he’s caused. He’s always known that his passion is hopeless, that Lolita has never loved him at all, that she’s not old enough to love him. Worse, he knows precisely what he’s done to her. “Something within her [had] been broken by me,” he confesses, an acknowledgment that’s reinforced in the novel’s final scene. Standing on a ridge above a small town in Colorado, he hears the faint, distant sounds of children playing and knows that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” If he were his own judge, Humbert tells us, he’d give himself “thirty-five years for rape.” Of course, these passages came much later on in the book. The prisoners hadn’t read them yet. Perhaps they never would.

When I got home that afternoon, I looked up information about the man who was steamed to death. It was just as Turk had said. The prisoner, who was serving a thirty-year sentence for murdering his girlfriend in 2008, was “found unresponsive . . . inside his cell, which was full of steam.” It was unclear whether his death was an accident or a suicide. A review of the incident was being conducted, and three correctional officers had been placed on “routine administrative leave.”

MARCH 11, 2015

Heavy snow had kept the prison school closed for two weeks; today it finally felt a little closer to spring. As I drove past the freight train cutting opposite the prison, I noticed crows had started building their nests in the still-bare trees.

The mood of the group felt slightly better today, although the men kept to their new seating arrangement, and it took a while for things to settle down, as there was a lot of noise in the hall. It might have been coming from the chapel, which was right next to our classroom, but it sounded less like preaching or praying than an angry, ongoing argument. Finally, at my request, Day-Day got up and closed the door as far as he could without locking it. Although it was warmer than the last time we’d met, there was still a chill in the air, and most of the men were wearing long-sleeved shirts layered under their T-shirts. Nick alone was wearing baggy shorts and his old, faithful “Coma Cola” T-shirt, so threadbare that it was almost an abstraction. I tried to imagine the expression on Officer Grubb’s face if I’d tried coming into the prison clad in something so notional.

We’d missed two weeks of classes, but the men had kept up with their reading and by now were halfway through the book. I was pleased they’d continued with Lolita, although they still despised Humbert Humbert. J.D. was especially outspoken, and I wondered whether this was because Vincent was no longer in the group to overshadow him. His broken hand was encased in a huge cast, with only his thumb visible, and when it came to Humbert Humbert, it pointed straight down.

“It really bothers me when he uses all the French,” he began. “None of us can understand it. It seems like he just wants to show you how superior he is.”

Everyone nodded.

“Unfortunately, French lessons aren’t on offer in this particular facility,” Sig added.

“You won’t find too many cosmopolitans in here,” Doug agreed. “Nor will you find many ‘metrosexuals,’ as people call them today.”

“But it’s not just the French,” J.D. went on. “It’s all bullshit, all his long, fancy words. I can see through it. It’s all a cover-up. I know what he wants to do to her.”

This annoyed me. “You can’t simply dismiss the language as though it’s irrelevant, like a veil disguising something horrible. Take away the language and there’s no Lolita.”

“I know what J.D.’s saying, though.” Steven joined the debate. “Like, that thing with Annabel Leigh. It’s like he’s looking back and trying to pretty it all up. It just made me think he must have had something to hide.”

Charles agreed. “Humbert sounds very persuasive, but we’ve only got his side of things. I feel like he’s making excuses for his behavior. Bottom line, he’s trying to cover up the fact that he’s a pedophile.”

Now I was even more irritated. “There is no ‘bottom line,’” I said. “This is a love story.”

Charles, sitting to my right, muttered, “That’s a crock right there.”

“What’s a crock?”

“What you just said,” he sneered. “This isn’t a love story. Get rid of all the fancy language, bring it down to the lowest common denominator, and it’s a grown man molesting a little girl is what it is.”

“But you can’t do that!” I was outraged. “This isn’t a court case where we’re trying to work out what happened. We can’t throw out everything that doesn’t matter. It all matters! This is literature!”

Charles sighed, sat back, and stretched out his legs. I knew he was about to launch into one of his long analogies. No interruptions would be permitted.

“You know,” he began, “this shrink told me that I could walk into a beautiful, freshly painted room, and if the painters had missed one single spot, I’d find it right away. No matter what color or how beautiful the paint is, no matter how clever, skillful, or talented the painters are, no matter what stroke or style is used, this spot can’t be covered up. Well, in this story, the spot on the wall is pedophilia.”

“I completely disagree with you,” I said.

“I kind of thought you might,” he replied.

One of my initial hesitations about reading Lolita in the book club was my concern that Nabokov’s style would be too difficult for the men. Now I realized it wasn’t nearly as convoluted as Conrad’s, although Nabokov used more foreign phrases and literary allusions. The problem was that I saw language as central to Lolita, but the prisoners saw it as a way to make the vile lusts of a pedophile seem high-minded, a smoke screen to distract gullible intellectuals who fell for a fancy prose style. In other words, fools like me.

I wasn’t the only one who liked the book. Others were enjoying it, too, but not for the same reasons. Day-Day, dressed in an orange knit skullcap and wearing orange-tinted sunglasses, told us that he liked the book because he loved Lolita. He’d reached the part where she was starting to charge Humbert for the sexual favors she once gave him for free.

“Lolita getting smart,” he said. “When I read this part, I thought, ‘Damn, my Lolita growing up.’ She take control, playing the pimp, She doing bad things at school. She know Humbert do everything she want him to do.”

He then left for his Men of Character group.

“Any other opinions?”

“To be honest, this book is boring the crap out of me,” said Nick. “They’re just driving around. Nothing’s happening anymore. We don’t need all this description. We know what the countryside looks like.”

I wish I could have helped these men, stuck in their six-by-seven-foot prison cells, to find more satisfaction in Nabokov’s glorious descriptions of the American landscape. In my own case, after eighteen years in the U.S., the magic of the countryside remains for me: in fireflies, watermelon, whirring cicadas, hummingbirds, and summer thunderstorms. I’m still entranced, like Humbert Humbert, by the ever-changing landscape: cliffs, groves, pine forests, sage brush, “blueberry woods,” “red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers,” “heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone.” Given these congenial descriptions, I was surprised to learn that many of the book’s early readers—especially the British and French—found Lolita to be resolutely “anti-American.” Nabokov denied the charge, pronouncing the novel’s tender landscape details—the red barns and green corn—as his tribute paid to this “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country.”

MARCH 18, 2015

I’d never thought of Lolita as a story about pedophilia. To me, it was a love story and a story about language. I’d always considered language, as much as Lolita, to be Humbert’s tragic, tormented passion. He loves to describe her skin, her clothes, her voice, her “frail, honey-hued shoulders,” her “silky supple bare back,” her “chestnut head of hair,” her ears, her toes, the light hair on her arms and legs. She’s a word as well as a body. Just seeing her name in a class list gives Humbert such a “spine-thrill of delight” that he’s moved to tears—“hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed.” Ironically, it’s the very person making her suffer who evokes the reader’s compassion for Lolita. It’s this surface disjunction, for me at least, that provides Lolita with its magical, heart-rending tension. There’s another level of tension, too, between Humbert’s pain and his language. Charlotte is intoxicated by the way he speaks; she finds it artful and elegant, but to Lolita—and the men in the book club—it’s an embarrassment and a lie.

It bothered me that the prisoners seemed unable to separate Nabokov from Humbert Humbert. They couldn’t believe that the person writing about Humbert’s sexual interests didn’t share those sexual interests himself. When I talked about the imagination, and research, and Nabokov’s long and healthy marriage, they seemed suspicious. I found it difficult to understand why they couldn’t separate the two, why they were so angered by Humbert Humbert’s “fancy words,” and why they found it so difficult to trust him. If his voice had no consistency or plausibility, after all, we’d be unable to engage with the story in any way. He may be deranged, dodgy, or deluded, but he’s still describing what he believes to be true. You could make the case that most of the time Humbert tells the story in such a way as to justify his own behavior, but isn’t this how we all tell our stories, consciously or not?

I believe Humbert is honest about his feelings. In other circumstances—when he’s describing the American landscape, or the town of Ramsdale, or Lolita’s body—he’s given us no reason not to trust him, bearing in mind he’s writing a retrospective account of his life for the benefit of judge and jury. If he elicits our sympathy, it’s because he observes so much and because his descriptions are so striking and original, not because he skews them to his advantage; he does not. As a matter of fact, he’s intensely clear-eyed and self-critical, always reminding us of his biases and exaggerations. It’s impossible for the sensitive reader not to realize, for example, that Charlotte is far more intelligent and complex than the clownish caricature Humbert presents us with. And although he loves Lolita obsessively, he readily admits she can be “a most exasperating brat.”

Yet the men were unable to let go of the pedophile question. To me, that was exasperating. They never seemed to want to talk about anything else. They seemed to be blind to everything that I loved about the book.

“Can’t we manage to have a discussion of Lolita without using the word ‘pedophile’?” I asked them. “Why can’t we ever get away from that word?”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Turk. “Because a lot of guys in here, their sisters or girlfriends or their cousins have had their lives ruined by guys like this Mr. Humbert Humbert. Me personally, I’ve found this book very difficult to read for that reason. I got three daughters, and there’s a lot of family issues it brings up.”

“Turk’s right,” agreed Sig. “When I was first locked up, my daughters were aged five and six. For a long time, I really worried about them meeting somebody like Humbert Humbert and me being stuck here in prison and not being able to do anything about it. It really bothered me.” I remembered pictures Sig had shown me of his daughters when they were younger: beautiful, long-limbed girls, one blonde and one brunette, with Sig’s eyes and mouth. These days, I gathered, they were no longer in close contact with their father. I could see why reading a book like Lolita might upset him.

“It’s a sensitive topic,” said Donald thoughtfully. “This is some of the most believable fiction I’ve ever read. And one of the reasons it’s so sensitive is that here in this prison there’s a whole lot of Humbert Humberts. Matter of fact, we’re surrounded by them.”

“I understand it’s a sensitive topic,” I said. “But one of the things Lolita has taught me is that everybody is unique. There’s no such thing as ‘just an old pedo’ like Sig said. Even if you find somebody’s behavior reprehensible, pedophiles are people like you and me, individuals with histories, backgrounds, families, and relationships. I disagree that Humbert’s only interested in sex. Sex always spills over into other kinds of experiences and emotions, like the need to be loved, or to express power, or to leave your mark. Remember, Lolita had a huge crush on Humbert at first. And she’d had sex before. If he exploits her, she also exploits him, to a degree. It’s complicated, like all relationships.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Doug broke the silence.

“Any of you guys remember Ellwood Leuschner over in Baltimore Penitentiary?” he asked. Doug had served time in a number of different prisons.

A couple of the older guys nodded.

“This guy Ellwood Leuschner was just like Humbert Humbert,” explained Doug. “He was real smart. Had an amazing vocabulary. Matter of fact, he had a reputation for being a wonderful jailhouse lawyer because he was so intelligent. He actually got a lot of men out. Now, this guy was a pedophile. He’d raped and killed some young children in Salisbury, up there by the Campbell’s soup factory. Horrible crimes. I’d avoided him the whole time I was at the penitentiary, because that’s just the way it works with pedophiles. You keep away from them. But this guy was so smart, I was curious. Anyway, one day I saw him on his own—he was in the gym—so I took my chance. I went up and I said to him, ‘Leuschner, can I ask you something?’ And he said to me, ‘Doug, I know what you’re going to ask. And I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve thought about it for years and years, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure it out and make sense of it. And all I can tell you is this. Something comes over me, and I can’t control myself. And that’s all I know.’”

MARCH 26, 2015

There’d been an outbreak of norovirus at JCI. The men were in a good mood when we met, and the atmosphere was lively. They wanted to tell me all about the bug that had been going around, who’d caught it, and what their symptoms had been. They didn’t seem to want to talk about Lolita. Steven especially was even more upbeat than usual. He’d just received news that his mentor, who’d offered to share his home with Steven upon his release, had also hired him a prestigious attorney—in fact, none other than “Go Home” Cardin. Apparently, Cardin thought that if things went well, Steven could be out of prison by August. A year ago I’d have seen this as wishful thinking, but after Vincent’s release, I’d seen for myself what could happen. (In fact, Steven was released on June 24.)

The men were supposed to have finished Lolita by this week, and I had to interrupt the conversation to ask for their final verdicts.

Turk wiped his brow theatrically. “Man!” he said. “I thought that other cat was hard!”

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“No, not Shakespeare, that other cat.”

“Poe?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Poe. Edgar Allan Poe.”

“This guy can really write, though,” said Donald. “You can fall in love with the story even though you hate what it’s about, because you like the language so much. It draws you in. You almost start to get misled.”

“What do you mean, ‘get misled’?” I asked him.

“You almost start to feel sorry for the guy.”

“Why shouldn’t you feel sorry for him?” I asked. “Isn’t he suffering?”

There was an uncomfortable pause. Then Doug spoke.

“In here,” he said, “we’re all used to listening to police and prosecutors. They see everything we say as ways of rationalizing the seriousness of the charges against us. They think that whatever we say is said to mislead other people. And I guess we’ve sort of internalized their way of looking at things, because to us, Humbert’s highfalutin language is a kind of ruse. Instead of being impressed by it, we automatically wonder what he’s trying to hide.”

“That’s a good point,” said Sig. “Like, I noticed there’s not one single curse word in the entire book so far, and I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this guy? What’s he trying to hide? Why can’t he just tell it like it is?’”

“Still,” Steven concurred. “You’ve got to admire him. Whatever you say about him, he’s slick as shit at what he does. If he were a forger, he’d be the world’s best forger. If he were a cat burglar, he’d be the world’s best cat burglar. It turns out that he’s a pedophile, and you could say he’s king of the pedophiles.”

“You know, I’m starting to get interested in the guy,” said Charles.

“Really?” I was surprised. “After everything you’ve said?”

He nodded. “I’ve let go of the spot on the wall. I’ve managed to get over the fact that this book is all about a slick-talking pervert.”

“How did you do that?”

“I don’t know. It just happened. I just found myself getting more involved in the story. Humbert was starting to get reckless and stupid. I just knew he was going to get caught. Our tier was on lockdown all day Tuesday, so I finished it then.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. On Monday night a guy got stabbed. It was around 9:30, which is when they lock us in for the evening. I was in my cell, so I didn’t see what happened, but I saw them carrying the guy who’d been stabbed off the tier.”

“So, thanks to the guy getting stabbed, you developed an interest in Lolita.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Charlie’s right. You want to know what happens,” Sig explained. “That’s what’s held my interest. I wanted Humbert to get what’s coming to him.”

“It should have happened a long time ago,” said Turk. “Where’s that Poe when you really need him?”

“But you don’t like Poe,” I said.

Turk laughed. “I said, ‘Where’s the Po-Po when you really need them? I’m talking about the po-lice. They should have arrested this Mr. Humbert a long time ago. But he’s too smart for them. He was a player. A smooth operator.”

“I’m glad Lolita got away, but she should have escaped a lot earlier,” said Steven.

“Remember, he basically told her that if she ever tried turning him in, they’d arrest him and put her in an orphanage?” Donald reminded him. “That was smart, because she believed him. She thought being with Humbert would be better than what would happen to her if she was on her own.”

“Right. He said he was trying to protect her, but he was actually trying to hide her from the law,” said Steven. “It made things worse for her in the end. That guy Quilty was another pedo.”

I got stuck in traffic on the way back to Baltimore that afternoon—there’d been an accident on the highway—and as I sat in my car waiting for things to start moving again, I had to face the fact that, much to my dismay, the prisoners had got it right. These men, some of whom were guilty of terrible crimes, had immediately sympathized with twelve-year-old Lolita. They recognized at once that she was suffering. They talked about her mother’s cruelty, her sobs in the night, her loneliness, her entrapment, her abuse by Humbert Humbert and later by Quilty. And I, with my weakness for a fancy prose style, had fallen into Nabokov’s trap and could see Lolita only through Humbert’s eyes, as his invention, his nymphet. I could not make sense of or see her, as the prisoners did, as a little girl in her own right. Instead, I believed what Humbert told me. I was taken in by him. I thought he was a special case. I wanted to analyze the narrator and his prose, to reach deeper and further layers and levels of psychological complexity, to scrutinize and dissect his sentence structure and word choice; but all the time this was leading me further and further away from the main fact of the matter: Lolita’s pain.

APRIL 9, 2015

For our last session on Lolita, we sat down to watch the Stanley Kubrick movie adaptation from 1962, which I’ve always loved, mostly because of James Mason’s performance as Humbert Humbert. After the experience with Macbeth, I was a little worried the prisoners might find it boring, as it’s shot in black-and-white and there are no explicit sex or action scenes. But this time the men managed to stay awake. It was hot in the classroom, yet despite the heat I felt profoundly comfortable, with a large fan blowing behind me and Luke snoring quietly on the floor to my left. The men were slumped in their seats chewing candy, sharing private jokes and comments, and chuckling to themselves quietly (or not so quietly, in Doug’s case). I liked being in the hot room with the men; I enjoyed their lazy, accepting camaraderie.

As I was driving home, however, I started to rethink this notion of camaraderie. How genuine was it? Sometimes it seemed like an illusion. Were the prisoners really allies, or was it just a temporary bonding? Most of them were no doubt very lonely at times, but were they any lonelier than people on the outside? Then I remembered how surprised I was when, after the book club had been meeting for more than two years, one of the men, in conversation, referred to “that really tall guy,” meaning Nick. Even now, after almost three years, I know for a fact there were men in the book club who didn’t know the names of other men in the group. When I wondered how this could be—there were only nine of them, and I addressed them by name all the time—I realized it didn’t mean they weren’t aware of one another. It just meant they’d learned to mind their own business and act as if they didn’t know, even if they did.

Some of the prisoners, I felt, seemed bound together inseparably. A few had known one another for decades, and between them I’d seen expressions of what appeared to be deep affection and respect. But when I pointed this out, Charles was quick to reply. “Yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen that,” he said, in his usual tone of half-repressed belligerence. “But what you haven’t seen is the anger, frustration, misery, hate, suffering, and other things like violence and death. The depth of pain and mental and emotional conflict that we endure is something we can escape from for an hour or so in this group, and that’s why you’ve never seen it.”

I’ve never seen it, but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of imagining it. The longer I continued with the book club, the more I thought about the men when I was away from them. I thought about their sadness and their pain. I also thought about how special solidarities can extend through a physically closed-off place, how isolated people come to rely on one another for assistance and emotional support, like the proverbial community of strangers that comes together in the face of a catastrophe. No doubt those who were released would disappear into their respective communities and never see one another again, but those who foresaw no chance of release knew that, like it or not, they’d spend the rest of their lives together.

I was lucky. I wasn’t caught up in the catastrophe. Each week, after my time at the prison was over, I was free to go. But I grew so fond of these nine men, and I got so much pleasure from their company, that every time I said good-bye, a small part of me wished I could stay.