Read The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Online
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (5 page)
At a double remove from the usual review media,
Lolita
went generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of 1956 Graham Greene in England recommended
Lolita
as one of the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a columnist in the
Sunday Express
, which moved Greene to respond in
The Spectator
. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint tempest in an old teapot),
The New York Times Book Review
of February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling
Lolita
“a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name. Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of mail,”
The Times
devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject, quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground existence of
Lolita
, which became public in the summer of 1957 when the
Anchor Review
in New York
devoted 112 of its pages to Nabokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a Book Entitled
Lolita
.” When Putnam’s brought out the American edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertisements with an array of statements by respectable and even distinguished literary names, though
Lolita
’s fast climb to the top of the best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine” (to quote John Shade in
Pale Fire
[1. 680]), also creating storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, including an editorial in
The New Republic;
but, since these at best belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be detailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the daily
New York Times
of August 18, 1958, has a charm that should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”
11
Prescott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in
The Southern Quarterly Review
(January 1852), who found an earlier, somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolerable: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners, is a monstrous bore.…”
Not surprisingly, Humbert Humbert’s obsession has moved commentators to search for equivalent situations in Nabokov’s earlier work, and they have not been disappointed. In
The Gift
(written between 1935 and 1937), some manuscript pages on the desk of the young poet Fyodor move a character to say:
“Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime,
fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul.…” (pp. 176–77)
Although the passage
12
seems to anticipate
Lolita
(“It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works,” says Fyodor [p. 194]),
Laughter in the Dark
(1932) is mentioned most often in this regard, since Albert Albinus sacrifices everything, including his eyesight, for a girl, and loses her to a hack artist, Axel Rex. “Yes,” agrees Nabokov, “some affinities between Rex and Quilty exist, as they do between Margot and Lo. Actually, of course, Margot was a common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita [and, technically speaking, no nymphet at all—A.A.]. Anyway I do not think that those recurrent sexual oddities and morbidities are of much interest or importance. My Lolita has been compared to Emmie in
Invitation
, to Mariette in
Bend Sinister
, and even Colette in
Speak, Memory.…” (Wisconsin Studies
interview, see
Bibliography
). Nabokov is justly impatient with those who hunt for Ur-Lolitas, for a preoccupation with specific “sexual morbidities” obscures the more general context in which these oddities should be seen, and his Afterword offers an urgent corrective. The reader of this Introduction should turn to that Afterword, “On a Book Entitled
Lolita
,” but not before placing a bookmark here, one substantial enough to remind him to return—a brightly colored piece of clothing would be suitable (the Notes
Palearctic … Nearctic
through
My private tragedy … my natural idiom
are particularly recommended). Now please turn to
the Afterword
.
Having just completed the Afterword, the serious reader is familiar with Nabokov’s account of
Lolita
’s origins. That “initial shiver of inspiration”
resulted in a novella,
the Enchanter (Volshebnik)
, written in Russian in 1939 and published posthumously in a translation by Dmitri Nabokov.
13
In the first of the two passages below, the “enchanter” sees the young girl for the first time in what might be the Tuileries Gardens:
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 as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight. Subsequently (for as long as the sequel lasted), it seemed to him that right away, at that very moment, he had appreciated all of her from tip to toe: the liveliness of her russet curls (recently trimmed); the radiance of her large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries; her merry, warm complexion; her pink mouth, slightly open so that two large front teeth barely rested on the protuberance of the lower lip; the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest; the way the folds of her skirt moved; their succinctness and soft concavities; the slenderness and glow of her uncaring legs; the coarse straps of the skates.
She stopped in front of his garrulous neighbor, who turned away to rummage in something lying to her right, then produced a slice of bread with a piece of chocolate on it and handed it to the girl. The latter, chewing rapidly, used her free hand to undo the straps and with them the entire weighty mass of the steel soles and solid wheels. Then, returning to earth among the rest of us, she stood up with an instantaneous sensation of heavenly barefootedness, not immediately recognizable as the feel of skateless shoes, and went off, now hesitantly, now with easy strides, until finally (probably because she had done with the bread) she took off at full tilt, swinging her liberated arms, flashing in and out of sight, mingling with a kindred play of light beneath the violet-and-green trees. (pp. 26–28)
The “enchanter” makes no sexual advances until the final pages, soon after the girl’s mother has died:
“Is this where I’m going to sleep?” the girl asked indifferently, and when, struggling with the shutters, squeezing tight their eyelike chinks, he replied affirmatively, she took a look at the cap she was holding and limply tossed it on the wide bed.
“There we are,” said he after the old man had dragged in their suitcases and left, and there remained in the room only the pounding of his heart and the distant throbbing of the night. “There, now it’s time for bed.”
Reeling with sleepiness, she bumped into the corner of an armchair, at which point he, simultaneously sitting down in it, took her by the hip and drew her close. She straightened, stretching up like an angel, for a split second tensed every muscle, took another half step, and softly descended onto his lap. “My sweetheart, my poor little girl,” he spoke in a kind of general mist of pity, tenderness, and desire, as he observed her drowsiness, her wooziness, her diminishing smile, palpating her through the dark dress, feeling, through the thin wool, the band of the orphan’s garter on her bare skin, thinking how defenseless, abandoned, warm she was, reveling in the animate weight of her legs as they slithered apart and then, with the faintest corporeal rustle, recrossed at a slightly higher level. She slowly entwined a somnolent arm, in its snug little sleeve, around his nape, engulfing him with the chestnut fragrance of her soft hair.… (pp. 81–82)
But the narrator fails as both enchanter and lover, and soon afterwards dies in a manner which Nabokov will transfer to Charlotte Haze. While the scene clearly foreshadows the first night at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, its straightforward action and solemn tone are quite different, and it compresses into a few paragraphs what will later occupy almost two chapters (pp. 119–133). The narrator’s enjoyment of the girl’s “animate weight” suggests the considerably more combustible
lap scene
in
Lolita
, perhaps the most erotic interlude in the novel—but it only
suggests
it. Aside from such echoes, little beyond the basic idea of the tale subsists in
Lolita
; and the telling is quite literally a world apart.
The Enchanter
went unpublished not because of the forbidding subject matter, but rather, says Nabokov, because the girl possessed little “semblance of reality.”
14
In 1949, after moving from Wellesley to Cornell, he became involved in a “new treatment of the theme, this time in English.”
Although
Lolita
“developed slowly,” taking five years to complete, Nabokov had everything in mind quite early. As was customary with him, however, he did not write it in exact chronological sequence. Humbert’s confessional diary was composed at the outset of this “new treatment,” followed by Humbert and Lolita’s first journey westward, and the climactic scene in which Quilty is killed (“His death had to be clear in my mind in order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov). Nabokov next filled in the gaps of Humbert’s early life, and then proceeded ahead with the rest of the action, more or less in chronological order. Humbert’s final interview with Lolita was composed at the very end, in 1954, followed only by John Ray’s Foreword.
Especially new in this treatment was the shift from the third person to the first person, which created—obviously—the always formidable narrative problem of having an obsessed and even mad character meaningfully relate his own experience, a problem compounded in this specific instance by the understandable element of self-justification which his perversion would necessarily occasion, and by the fact that Humbert is a dying man. One wonders whether Thomas Mann would have been able to make
Death in Venice
an allegory about art and the artist if Aschenbach had been its narrator. While many of Nabokov’s other principal characters are victims (Luzhin, Pnin, Albinus), none of them tells his own story; and it is only Humbert who is both victim and victimizer, thus making him unique among Nabokov’s first-person narrators (discounting Hermann, the mad and murderous narrator of
Despair
, who is too patently criminal to qualify properly as victim). By having Humbert tell the tale, Nabokov created for himself the kind of challenge best described in Chapter Fourteen of
Speak, Memory
when, in a passage written concurrently with the early stages of
Lolita
, he compares the composition of a chess problem to “the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings.”
15
In addition to such obstacles, the novel also developed slowly because of an abundance of materials as unfamiliar as they were unlikely. It had been difficult enough to “invent Russia and Western Europe,” let alone
America, and at the age of fifty Nabokov now had to set about obtaining “such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average ‘reality’ (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy. “What was most difficult,” he later told an interviewer, “was putting myself … I am a normal man, you see.”
16
Research was thus called for, and in scholarly fashion Nabokov followed newspaper stories involving pedophilia (incorporating some into the novel), read case studies, and, like Margaret Mead coming home to roost, even did research in the field: “I travelled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita, I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri [his son], one kneecap of another,”
17
and thus a nymphet was born.
