Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Sexually precocious, she travels a dangerous road. To be male would be safer; in one of his few factual misrepresentations, Nabokov, who researched pedophilia carefully, opines,

  Ladies and gentlemen35 of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen… . Poets never kill.

  They do kill, though. Humbert kills; Clare Quilty, his nemesis, dies by his hand, and Charlotte Haze, his wife, dies in an accident brought on by his acts. Lolita dies, too. After years of his misprotection, she liberates herself by means of a different, stranger captivity, with Quilty. But the mark is upon her: the doomful sex mark. She is American, and for us these things are never simple. Hawthorne seems to attend her as she lights out, Huck Finn style, for the Alaska territory, pregnant with a child who will never be born: hoping to outrun her bad luck, she only manifests the curse more clearly, finds swift destruction.

  11.

  Nosy Miss Pratt, of the Beardsley School, comically misunderstands Lolita’s symptoms, but she gets the main thing right: sex is at the bottom of it all. Concern for “ ‘the adjustment of the child to group life’ ” is, to Miss Pratt’s way of thinking, concern about sexual development rather than ethical or intellectual growth. As a midcentury American educator who hopes to appear advanced, she puts sex forward—“ ‘This is why we stress the four D’s1,’ ” she tells Humbert: “ ‘Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating.’ ” The Freudian century is roaring on its way. Freudianism, with its insights into many issues, reduces in the popular mind to a focus on sex. It is Humbert’s unusual luck—for good or ill, who knows—to have landed in America in the middle of the century of sex.

  Freud did not invent sex, and sex in literature also predates him. Nabokov famously loathed Freud: he maintained his own mental hygiene, he said, by taking “gleeful pleasure2 every morning in refuting the Viennese Quack by recalling the details of my dreams without using one single reference to sexual symbols or mythical complexes.” Yet the popular corruption of Freudianism—that “it’s all about sex”—is an attitude consistent with his best novel3. His protagonist is surely sex-obsessed. He has been marked for life by a sexual interlude in childhood; Lolita fulfills the dream that infuses that tormented life, gets him excited again. Were there a case that more clearly demonstrates the potency of childhood sexual trauma, it would be hard to make out; Humbert, also an anti-Freudian, an “anarchist” according to his creator, is trapped in a script seemingly dictated by the first psychoanalyst.

  Nabokov’s earlier novels contain some arousing passages, but sexual fulfillment is usually attended by disaster, as in The Eye (1930), Laughter in the Dark, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and other works. His most erotic passages are not accounts of sex acts but descriptions of objects of desire. His protagonists become conduits of enamored perception, connoisseurs of female allure:

  The two sisters resembled each other; the frank bulldogish heaviness of the elder’s features was just perceptible in Vanya, but in a different way that lent significance and originality to the beauty of her face. The sisters’ eyes, too, were similar—black-brown, slightly asymmetric, and a trifle slanted, with amusing little folds on the dark lids. Vanya’s eyes were more opaque at the iris … somewhat myopic, as if their beauty made them not quite suitable for everyday use.

  The Eye

  Albinus taught her to bathe daily instead of only washing her hands and neck as she had done hitherto. Her nails were always clean now, and polished a brilliant red… . He kept discovering new charms in her—touching little things which in any other girl would have seemed to him coarse and vulgar. The childish lines of her body, her shamelessness and the gradual dimming of her eyes (as if they were being slowly extinguished like the lights in a theater) roused him to … frenzy.

  Laughter in the Dark

  “What’s so attractive about her, after all?” he thought for the thousandth time. “All right, she has those dimples, that pale complexion—that’s not enough. Her eyes are so-so, gypsyesque, and her teeth are uneven. And her lips are so thick, so glossy—if one could just stop them, shut them up with a kiss. And she thinks she looks English in that blue suit… . As soon as Martin achieved an attitude of indifference toward Sonia, he would suddenly notice what a graceful back she had, how she tilted her head—and her slanted eyes ran across him with a swift chill.

  Glory

  Sex acts abound in some of the books. Yet Nabokov eschews rough language—profanity absolutely—and his visits to the boudoir are Hollywoodish: faux-sophisticated, with shots before the act and after, the act itself undescribed. Sex happens briskly and with an unreal frequency. In Laughter in the Dark, Margot, the cruel, taunting mistress, repeatedly has intercourse with Rex, her sociopathic lover, under the nose of Albinus, the man she enjoys betraying; she also has it repeatedly with Albinus. In Ada, written thirty years later, the same rabbity automatism undercuts credibility. Sex in Nabokov4 is mostly odorless and unlubricated, and indirectly realized. The urgent and risky labor that some authors of his era assumed—to imagine and write about sex with expressive power, with nothing left out—was not his duty, not his choice.

  He wrote well about amorousness: the disposition to become obsessed, to fetishize a lover. In The Enchanter, his first Lolita-like fiction, he brought his special eye to the task:

  A violet-clad girl5 of twelve … 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… . Subsequently … 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 … her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs.

  Nabokov recalled The Enchanter as “a dead scrap6”: “I was not pleased7 with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940.” Twenty years later, while gathering up manuscripts to give the Library of Congress for a tax break, he found the work and read it with “considerably more pleasure” and decided that it was “a beautiful piece8 of Russian prose, precise and lucid.” Still, he did not say it was a success—that it worked as a story.

  Writing about the ravishing of a child challenged him, reduced him to near incoherence. The opening pages are off-putting9 and opaque. The protagonist, unnamed, in an unnamed European city, anatomizes his attraction to little girls. The writing is full of arch euphemisms. The fifty-five-page piece (in Russian manuscript) holds the subject at arm’s length, just as the protagonist holds his own compulsion away, horrified but unable not to speak of it. He is a “thin, dry-lipped10” man with a “slightly balding head,” closely resembling the dog-eyed, ineffectual men of Humbert’s sex-molester profile (rather than Humbert himself, who is “a handsome, intensely virile grown-up” in Lolita’s eyes).

  The Enchanter reads smoothly after its wan beginning. It differs from Lolita in its lack of immediacy (third-person as against first, expository rather than scenic) and in its simplicity11, the richly worked allusive style of Lolita only hinted at. There are countless similarities, though, from images—Lolita is also described in terms of gooseberries; little girls in both books are said to have a “biscuity” smell—to crucial plot turns, and when the author revisited this material ten years later, no doubt much imaginative work had already been done. Why he returned is the question. The situation of a gentleman pedophile who inherits a child had produced a
tale that misfired, in the direction of boredom rather than sensation; it did not seem promising.

  Nabokov’s personal interest in the material, possibly of a prurient kind, might have brought him back. As a professional writer, he sensed opportunity. Wilson’s experience with Hecate County—surely not determinative, but concurrent with Nabokov’s dusting off of the material—drew attention. This is the kind of frankness that Wilson brought to his audacious novel, his first bestselling book after some twenty American titles:

  But what struck12 and astonished me most was that not only were her thighs perfect columns but that all that lay between them was impressively beautiful, too, with an ideal aesthetic value that I had never found there before. The mount was of a classical femininity: round and smooth and plump: the fleece, if not quite golden, was blond and curly and soft; and the portals were a deep tender rose like the petals of some fresh flower. And they were doing their feminine work of making things easy for the entrant with a honeysweet sleek profusion that showed I had quite misjudged her in suspecting … she was really unresponsive to caresses.

  In another notorious passage, Wilson wrote,

  I remember13 one cold winter Sunday when Anna had come in the afternoon, a day of blank uptown facades and decorous uptown perspectives, when I had gone down to the deserted museum to look something up in a book, and, returning, it seemed so incongruous to watch her take off her pink slip and to have her in her prosaic brassiere: the warm and adhesive body and the mossy damp underparts … between the cold afternoon sheets in the gray-lit Sunday room; and one evening when I had come home from a party, at which I had made Imogen smile by my tender and charming gallantries … and had made love to Anna for the second time, by a sudden revival of appetite after she had put on her clothes to go, by way of her white thighs and buttocks, laid bare between black dress and gray stockings.

  Wilson read Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) used forbidden terms14. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, according to Leon Edel, the editor of Wilson’s compilation The Twenties (1975), provided the idea for an American take15 on class and sex à la Lawrence’s. Though Wilson’s descriptions seem quiet now, certainly not pornographic, “what we should remember,” Edel wrote, “is that … in its truth to life and to himself [his frankness] antedated the later avalanche of erotic16 writings that now colors the creative imagination of America.”

  The Enchanter, nothing like as bold, does strike one graphic note. At the end of the unnamed subject’s torturous encounter with his own pedophilia, rendered in terms of far-fetched conceits (“Never … had the subordinate clause17 of his fearsome life been complemented by the principal one,” etc.), we find:

  Already his gaze18 … was creeping downward along [the body of a sleeping, half-clothed child]… . Finally making up his mind, he gently stroked her long, just slightly parted, faintly sticky legs, which grew cooler and a little coarser on the way down… . He recalled, with a furious sense of triumph, the roller skates, the sun, the chestnut trees, everything—while he kept stroking with his fingertips, trembling and casting sidelong looks at the plump promontory, with its brand-new downiness, which, independently but with a familial parallel, embodied a concentrated echo of something about her lips and cheeks.

  The book has been reserved so far—and never has the molester succeeded in molesting. Though at last touching her, he ravishes more piercingly with his gaze, and Nabokov’s love of fixing specimens and gazing at them “in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope” comes to mind as his doomed protagonist, who in minutes will die in a road accident, glimpses very heaven.

  Possibly what drew him back was the hope that this material, so dangerous-feeling, so uneasy to write about, might compel a breakthrough. Not only a commercial breakthrough, although he longed for that (“All my previous books19 have been such dismal financial flops,” he wrote Katharine White in 1950), but a stylistic one. The Enchanter’s disappointments are in the prose. Nabokov’s dialogue, which will undergo a liberation in Lolita, in the direction of vividness and viciousness, is here stolid, with characters speaking in long, intelligent paragraphs that make women sound like men and men like women and both sound smothered, corseted:

  “Now let’s sit down20 and discuss things rationally,” she said a moment later, having descended heavily and meekly onto the newly returned sofa… . “First of all, my friend, as you know, I am a sick, a seriously sick, woman. For a couple of years now my life has been one of constant medical care. The operation I had on April twenty-fifth was in all likelihood the next-to-last one … next time they’ll take me from the hospital to the cemetery. No, no, don’t pooh-pooh what I’m saying. Let’s even assume I last a few more years.”

  “Please, try21 to understand,” he continued… . “Even if we pay them for everything, and even overpay them, do you think that will make her feel any more at home there? I doubt it. There’s a fine school there, you’ll tell me … but we’ll find an even better one here, apart from the fact that I am and always have been in favor of private instruction.”

  Nabokov mocks his characters’ stuffiness, but his story does not escape the mood. The wickedness of the trick marriage—played for black fun in Lolita—is barely exploited. Pedophilia leads swiftly to death, with no stops allowed along the way for demonic riffs, for a savage, Humbertian cutting loose.

  If he were going to enter the lists with the other novelists of sex—assuming, for the moment, that Nabokov ever thought of things this way—he would have to mark himself out. And Lolita does take astonishing, indelible leaps. The voyeuristic tendency of his sex writing, suggestive of common-garden Peeping Tomism in The Enchanter, deepens; in The Enchanter, descriptions of the nameless girl tend toward the generic, but Lolita passes before the gaze of a genius of specificity, and her American setting receives similarly lively treatment.

  The roller-skating girl was a blur of teeth, curls, and merry cheeks. But Lolita casts an uncanny spell, whereby time slows and her seducer, at first out of his mind with lust, learns to slow down, too. Early on, he reports “an immobilized fraction22 of her, a cinematographic still” in his mind, as “with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe.” Then comes a flood of recognitions, pitched in various registers—mooncalf, tumescent, scientific, ironic, adoring. It amounts to a kind of Audubon’s Birds of America about a single child, the type specimen of the taxon nymphet:

  The soot-black lashes23 of her pale-gray vacant eyes … five asymmetrical freckles … I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked candy… . Oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.

  The “lady writer” would be able to examine her clinically, therefore more exhaustively, but it is his corrupt, desirous gaze that brings her alive:

  She wore a plaid shirt24, blue jeans and sneakers… . After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet … and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—this is agony—a second time. Ping. Marvelous skin … tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food.

  All at once I knew I could kiss25 her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches… . A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange.

  Later in the novel—after Humbert has been ravaging Lolita at the rate of three acts of intercourse per day—he continues to discover her. The rotting monsters of his worse nature do not blind him; i
ndeed, his perceptions grow more complex, more tender:

  She wore her first cloth coat26 with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back—and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps… . Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip.

  The pulsing, frightening energy of the novel comes from looking ever deeper at a forbidden thing. For him the captive nymphet is inexhaustible as a subject; then, mysteriously, Lolita the girl is.

  That this will be a sex novel announces itself quickly. John Ray Jr., Ph.D., author of the foreword, identifies himself as an authority on “perversions27,” promising that “platitudinous evasions” will not obscure what’s to come. There will be scenes of an “ ‘aphrodisiac’ 28” nature, so prepare yourself. Ray’s foreword, read by most critics as a quick bath in Nabokovian irony, the smug editor daring to think he understands the work he introduces, stands in a proud tradition, that of noted American authors, Whitman and Poe for instance, who reviewed themselves under assumed names. Writing as Ray, Nabokov asserts the supreme value of his work: it is “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis,” he asserts, and though his tongue is in his cheek, this is an argument that his allies (his wife and son, prominently) would advance for the next fifty years: