Ellen Pifer
Prominent among the literary artifacts that Vladimir Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, contracted to sell at auction in June 2011—a sale preempted by an anonymous buyer who purchased the entire collection beforehand from Christie’s—were two pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses said to belong to Nabokov’s wife, Véra. How she acquired them remains a question, but one may assume they were gifts, perhaps from the same people who sold Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita to the public. Posters displaying a photo of Sue Lyon as Lolita, peering over heart-shaped sunglasses while seductively licking a red lollipop, disseminated this image throughout the world. No matter that the sunglasses perched on Lyon’s upturned nose when James Mason, in the role of Humbert Humbert, first spies her are entirely conventional in shape. Mass-market publishers took their cue from the poster: Within the next year and for decades to follow, paperback editions of the novel made the poster’s image ubiquitous in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. Today a reader can still purchase, for a mere two dollars on Amazon, a used Penguin paperback whose cover exhibits the famous heart-shaped sunglasses, along with the leer and the lollipop (1).
1. Lolita, Corgi Books (1969). Designer unknown.
However iconic it has become, this popular image of a lascivious Lolita licking a lollipop in the manner of an experienced porn star is a blatant misrepresentation of Nabokov’s novel, its characters, and its themes. Not only does it betray the nature of the child featured in its pages, it disregards the way that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, comes to terms with his role in ruining her life. Judging from the number of even more blatantly misleading covers sported by recent paperback editions worldwide—covers replete with spherical female breasts, shapely legs encased in sleek stockings, or nubile torsos framed in slight bras and bikinis—fidelity to the novel’s narrative has not been high on the list of publishers’ concerns. Like the cover of Vintage’s 2005 edition of Lolita—featuring the close-up of a woman’s enticing mouth, her full lips hinting at another, nether set of labia—such covers continue to perpetuate a narrative nowhere found in Nabokov’s text: that a twelve-year-old American kid named Dolores Haze was possessed of a promiscuous sexual appetite and highly charged erotic tastes (2). Nor do these covers bear any resemblance to the fantasized nymphet conjured by Humbert’s romantic imagination, an enthralling image to which he sacrifices the actual child’s welfare.
2. Lolita, Vintage International (2005). Designer: John Gall.
Such ill-conceived cover designs collude in the sexual exploitation of which Humbert is guilty. Each—the avid bookseller as well as the ardent pedophile—serves his own interests by ignoring the child depicted in Lolita’s pages. But even Humbert, for all the deception and tomfoolery involved in his narrative stance, ultimately acknowledges the sheer “distaste,” the “plain repulsion” with which Dolores Haze received his relentless sexual advances. “Never did she vibrate under my touch,” he wistfully confesses to the reader. Dubbing Lolita his “Frigid Princess,” Humbert admits to stunting her development, both sexual and emotional, by constantly violating her body. A threnody for the destruction of a child’s life: This is the mournful lament to which Humbert’s narrative, despite all his attempts to muffle and mask it, finally gives voice. Prey to his obsessive desire, a twelve-year-old girl was robbed of not only her innocence but her personal and political freedom. The latter theme—the betrayal of the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is perhaps the most overlooked and underrated aspect of Nabokov’s American masterpiece. Travestied by countless lurid covers aimed at the prurient reader (whose dismay at the novel’s complex style and structure is surely inevitable), this vital theme merits the true reader’s attention.
When Dolores Haze’s mother, Charlotte, is run over by a car shortly after Humbert marries her, he quickly seizes the opportunity to play stepfather to the orphaned girl. Picking Dolly up from summer camp, he delays telling the unwitting child that her mother is dead until they embark on the first leg of their cross-country road trip together—the primary goal of which is to keep his nymphet close by and the law at bay. Taking full advantage of the superior social and economic authority he wields as an adult, and as the only parental figure in the child’s life, Humbert employs every means, physical and psychological, to hold her hostage to his desire. Playing on her fears of abandonment, he admits that if she were to expose him to the police, he would go to jail—but, he rhetorically asks, what would happen to her? With a theatrical flourish that borders on the hysterical, Humbert graphically paints for the child a picture of gothic doom:
While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. . . . In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet. . . . You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?
While readers may chuckle at the comic high jinks that Humbert’s prose enacts, the language of his parenthetical remarks provokes a shudder. The rewards of “terrorizing Lo” become all too clear: those sly parenthetical instructions indicate the process by which the reluctant child is made to yield yet again (“come here, my brown flower”) to Humbert’s insatiable sexual demands. Whether mechanically disrobing (Humbert’s “no, allow me, please” is a grim parody of polite respect) or “sobbing” in Humbert’s arms after discovering that her mother is dead, the child is no match for devious Humbert. As he admits, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
Humbert makes much of his discovery, in the Enchanted Hunters hotel, that Lo is not a virgin when they first become, in his misleading locution, “lovers.” She is the one who, he points out, first suggests that they have intercourse. But beneath Humbert’s expression of surprise and even concern—a stance to which he increasingly resorts in his masquerade as Lolita’s guardian and protector—some telling details emerge. (Here, we can say, the devil really is in the details.) The “game” that adolescent Dolores Haze suggests she and Humbert try out is one she has learned at camp from pimply Charlie Holmes, the thirteen-year-old son of the camp mistress: a game she naively believes only kids play. According to the novel’s time scheme, this scene takes place in the late 1940s; unlike contemporary American kids who have access to all manner of graphic content, Lo has not witnessed any onscreen sexual foreplay beyond the Hollywood kiss. By contemporary standards, that dreamy, deliberately blurred image is practically chaste. While Humbert maintains to the reader that Dolores Haze “seduced me,” he concedes—in a metaphor he coyly applies to the male sexual organ—that “she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up.” Although Humbert is careful not to dwell on any “elements of animality” involved in his repeated, if statutory, rape of a child, his account is revealing enough for any reader. Imagining himself “a painter” charged with rendering his incomparable ecstasy with the nymphet, Humbert variously alludes to his engorged organ as “a choking snake sheathing” its prey and “a column of onyx” that a “slave child” is forced to climb. Continuing to wax poetical, he describes the sensations of orgasm as harmlessly “dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool.” But then the mask, and the metaphors, slip as the narrator plainly exposes the “wincing child” in Humbert’s grasp—her “stinging red, smarting pink” body the instrument of his pleasure.
If Dolores’s initial infatuation with Humbert—which began when he was a boarder in the Haze household and was fueled by the adolescent’s rivalry with her widowed mother—was inspired by Humbert’s handsome, movie-star looks, she quickly discovers how distant her life is from Hollywood’s version of romance. Locked in her sordid existence with Humbert, she grows increasingly rebellious as she grows up, a process that fills him with dread. The passing of years can only spell the loss of his nymphet, the inevitable metamorphosis of the child, whom he calls his “aging mistress,” into a grown woman. The latter, Humbert makes clear, is an object of utter indifference to those enchanted hunters in perpetual pursuit of the nymphet’s “perilous magic.” In woeful anticipation of that dreaded day when Lolita transcends the boundaries circumscribing the nymphet’s brief life—the years between ages nine and fourteen—Humbert measures the circumference of the child’s thighs and hips to assure himself that she is still captive to his desire. But nothing can defeat the passage of time. And as time inevitably passes, the disjunction between Humbert’s romantic sensibility, in thrall to the image of the nymphet, and the studied “cool” of the adolescent kid whose body fuels his fantasy intensifies. Increasingly aware of being Humbert’s virtual prisoner, of having never consented to be his sexual partner, let alone his “lover,” the teenager grows sullen and defiant. Warding off any attempt at tenderness or even friendship with her captor, she retreats into the generation gap that yawns like an abyss between them. Arming herself with the only defense at her disposal, she masks her “vulnerability,” as Humbert ultimately admits, “in trite brashness and boredom.” Seizing every opportunity to shatter Humbert’s romantic pretensions, Dolly exposes the sordid nature of their relationship. At one point, for instance, as they drive away from the town of Beardsley, Humbert hears Lolita chuckle. “ ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said and she stretched out her palm at once.”
The teenager’s cynical gesture instantly debunks the illusion of intimacy that Humbert is at such pains to create, signaling instead the contempt with which she views their relationship: one that has taught her to exact payment for the sexual favors he incessantly demands. After several years of compulsory cohabitation with a man she regards as her captor, Dolores Haze plots her escape. Long before she elopes with Clare Quilty, she tries to collect enough cash to run away from Humbert. On constant alert against this threat, he resorts to ransacking her room and stealing the savings she has stashed away for this purpose. Much of the novel’s moral resonance derives from Humbert’s belated recognition of the crime he has committed; in pursuit of his fantasy nymphet, he has ruined a child’s life. In the course of narrating the novel, he journeys into the past, embarking on a process of recollection that leads to moral discovery. Humbert’s awakening to the “poor, bruised child” he exploited is accompanied by a dawning awareness of the vast American continent they traversed together. Insight manifests itself, in both cases, as the discovery of a new landscape or territory, a terra incognita to which his obsession had kept him blind. Such insights occur late in the novel, long after Lolita succeeds in escaping from him. As certain “smothered memories” come to light, Humbert is stunned to realize how little he actually knew about the child he victimized. He recognizes that, as he tells the reader, “I simply did not know a thing about [Lolita’s] mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me.” This remote garden, inaccessible to Humbert’s rabid gaze, constitutes the inner landscape, the private world of the child’s thoughts and dreams: the sovereign kingdom of her consciousness. By failing to honor her personal sovereignty, Humbert deprived Dolores Haze of her inalienable right to privacy and autonomy. As a result, he ultimately admits, “something within her” had been “broken” by him.
In recognizing Lolita’s claim to an independent existence, or a private kingdom, Humbert employs the language of monarchy, but the ideals that inform his revelation of personal sovereignty derive from democracy. It is precisely this paradox, “the splendid paradox of democracy,” that Nabokov eloquently articulated in a talk (“What Faith Means to a Resisting People”) delivered shortly after arriving on America’s shores with his wife and small son, having barely escaped the Nazi invasion of France. “The splendid paradox of democracy,” he said, “is that while stress is laid on the rule of all and equality of common rights, it is the individual that derives from it his special and uncommon benefit. Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbors as he pleases.” By depriving the child of her autonomy—denying her right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—Humbert committed not only a sexual crime but a political one. Having enslaved another human being to his will, he is guilty of tyranny. Like a petty dictator, he wielded his superior power—economic, physical, social—to subjugate another for the sake of his own pleasure and profit. No wonder that Dolly Haze seizes the first chance to escape her oppressor. Fittingly, her liberation occurs on July 4, America’s Independence Day. At the time, Humbert, sick in bed, takes little interest and less pleasure in the “great national celebration” going on outside his motel cabin. Still, the noise of exploding firecrackers and other displays of democratic enthusiasm wreak havoc—one might even say revenge—on what remains of his peace of mind.
Humbert’s ultimate recognition of having robbed Lolita of her childhood and ruined her life implies his discovery, to some extent at least, of the democratic principles honored by his author. Like a blind man who, after a long and difficult operation, finally awakes to the visible world, Humbert discovers a New World in the American landscape that formerly baffled and bored him. Then Humbert contrasts the “world of total evil” in which he had forced Lolita to dwell with the pristine beauty of the landscape through which they traveled. Having traversed the length and breadth of the vast American continent—having been, as he says, “everywhere”—he perceives that he and Lolita “had really seen nothing.” Humbert adds, “And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night.”
Only in hindsight does Humbert gain insight; only in retrospect does he grant the child her reality, acknowledge her innocence. During their cross-country trek, Humbert spies the sign on a billboard announcing “children under 12 free”; to the reader he quips that twelve-year-old Lo is already “a young captive.” His play on words speaks volumes. In the end, Humbert delivers the harshest of sentences upon himself: because of him, “a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac.” Here Humbert evokes the vast landscape, moral and material, that was Dolly Haze’s by right—a dominion as boundless as the North American continent. Yet he forced her to play the role of “nymphet” in a despotic world conjured by his overweening imagination and desire. As he says early on in his narrative, “In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.” The world Humbert created was emptied of freedom for everyone but the tyrant holding sway. Ultimately, even he became its prisoner.
Humbert’s belated recognition of Dolores Haze’s autonomous self and identity is a moral awakening that Nabokov frames as the discovery of America in the deepest sense—signifying more than the discovery of a continent, more even than Nabokov’s own artistic exploration, growth, and development. To Nabokov, American democracy signaled a new and higher form of civilized life; he coined the term homo Americus to celebrate its highest ideals, not its national borders. Serenely indifferent throughout his life to patriotic slogans and marching bands, Nabokov selected a well-known Englishman to serve as his model of homo Americus. Charles Dickens’s great compassion as a writer, Nabokov told his students at Cornell University, marks an advance on the part of modern humanity over our remote ancestors. Nowhere among the ancients does one find “the divine throb of pity” that radiates throughout Bleak House. In Homer there is “Horror, yes—and a kind of generalized routine compassion”; but, the lecturer asks, “is the keen sense of specialized pity as we understand it today . . . [found] in the dactyllic past?” Answering in the negative, Nabokov draws the following distinction: “despite all our hideous reversions to the wild state, modern man is on the whole a better man than Homer’s man, homo homericus, or the medieval man.”
Nabokov’s fierce love of freedom preceded by decades his move to America, in 1940; but like many others before him, he identified love of liberty and justice with the very idea of America. Still, he was painfully aware that any American, any citizen, and particularly a vulnerable, innocent child, can be brutally deprived of liberty. That is why Nabokov sought to correct some of Lolita’s readers, who rushed to sympathize with the novel’s “touching” narrator. “Humbert Humbert,” said Lolita’s author, “is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’ That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl.” Robbed of her childhood and dead at seventeen, Dolores Haze was denied her right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The vulgar designs that appear on so many covers of Lolita betray not only the child Nabokov depicts in his narrative but the very ideals of democracy—equality, justice, freedom for all—that the novel celebrates and reflects.
Bibliography
Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980.
______. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1989.
______. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973