by Robert Roper
A great work of art29 is of course always original, and … should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity… . A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
Another shameless American self-promoter—American by naturalization—attending these early pages is Frank Harris, author of the most notorious sex memoir published during Nabokov’s lifetime. Humbert, like the Harris of My Life and Loves (1922), loses his mother at age three; sexual feelings come soon after (age five for Harris; for Humbert, a bit later, when he observes “some interesting30 reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté Humaine”).
Nabokov parodies Harris’s and other sex memoirs, but meanwhile he indites one31. Sex is not a theme threaded through the story of a life but itself the story, with other elements to clothe it. Unlike Harris, who fancied himself a crusader for a subterranean tradition in English writing, “the one of perfect liberty32, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a … liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech,” Nabokov cannot or will not overcome his distaste for profanity. Euphemisms marble this text as they did The Enchanter, but here they fail to disguise—often, they perversely underscore—a new directness about physicality, a lurid explicitness:
Next moment33, in a sham effort to retrieve [a magazine they were both looking at], she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.
They are alone in the house together; Mrs. Haze has gone to church. Humbert, wearing a silk dressing gown, “by this time … was in a state of excitement34 bordering on insanity,” and he “managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, [his] masked lust to her guileless limbs.”
Thoughts along these lines were enough to plunge The Enchanter’s antihero into a morbid, eventually fatal seizure of guilt. Humbert goes the whole hog. He will not rape the child, but he will have his satisfaction:
Talking fast35, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter—and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction … between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion.
Lolita seems oblivious; she chews on an “Eden-red apple.” In the frottage piece that follows, the slowing or stretching out of time associated with Humbert’s contemplation of a nymphet becomes an entrancement, an instance of sex magic: “I entered a plane of being36 where nothing mattered,” he says, “save the infusion of joy brewed within my body.” He loses himself
in the pungent37 but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay… . What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow.
Soon he begins thinking of seraglios and harem girls. He is describing incidentally a state of kavla, to use the Greek term prevalent in the Levant, meaning a state of impending orgasm and the timeless time of its inevitability:
I was a radiant38 and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss … I kept repeating chance words … as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed.
Lolita, too, seems on edge. Humbert touches a bruise on her thigh, and
“Oh, it’s nothing39 at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.
Though veiled by his “fancy prose style,” this is a transgressive sex act described to the very end. It does not have precedent in Nabokov’s oeuvre. It asserts that a child enjoys herself on her abuser’s lap; it shows that child in attitudes associated with a grown woman having an orgasm (shrill note, wiggling, head thrown back, teeth biting lip). Nabokov makes happen what formerly he did not or could not. The European gentleman of The Enchanter has metamorphosed into a new, rampant type of monster in a common American house, sated, sweaty, “immersed in a euphoria40 of release,” and not at all inclined to commit suicide for shame.
The composition41 of LOLITA took place over five years. Nabokov’s duties at Cornell were lighter than they had been at Wellesley, at least at the start; with a better salary, with Speak, Memory appearing serially in the New Yorker and attracting readers, with Dmitri doing well at a boarding school his parents liked, Nabokov was set up to undertake a long job of new work.
The writing was arduous. “Once or twice42 I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft,” he says in his afterword; his biographers agree that there were real attempts43 to destroy the book: one in the fall of ’48, as he was starting at Cornell, and another two years later. Véra is the heroine of the burnings. She fished four-by-six cards or pages from a galvanized can in which her husband had started a fire and then she stomped on them, telling him, “We are keeping44 this,” which judgment he accepted.
Burning, rather than throwing away, seemed called for because the book’s material was dangerous, explosive. Nabokov destroyed some of his research notes, and today there exists no holograph manuscript of Lolita because he burned the cards he composed on45 when he made a fair copy. The attempts to destroy the work in progress seem contrived, though—dramatic gestures. Véra came to the rescue because she was nearby; he did not start fires when his wife was out of the house.
Though he worried that no publisher in America would touch his new book—especially in light of the prosecution of Hecate County—he pushed on. He feared for his novel but also hoped for it. The nature of his difficulties is hard to make out; he blames “interruptions46 and asides,” and indeed there were many claims on his work time in these years. But problems with getting to write usually call for different scheduling, or patience, not for burning. Nabokov also blames age:
It had taken me some forty years47 to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average “reality” … into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best.
The evidence suggests, rather than a playing out of energies, a surge in them. In these years he was prodigious, and his move to Cornell inaugurated a working prime not equaled, in terms of quantity and originality of work produced, by any of his contemporaries writing in English. The claim of problems gathering “local ingredients,” of lacking the “receptiveness and retention” of youth, is untrue on the face of it—and not interestingly untrue, not another example of Nabokov having us on in a meaningful way. He remained receptive and fully immersed in American materials.
These years of Lolita were also the years of some of his
most extensive, most joyous wanderings in the West. Places visited—the Corral Log Motel, Afton, Wyoming; Teton Pass Ranch, near Jackson Hole; the “optimistic48 and excellent Valley View Court,” Telluride’s only motel in ’51; the Chiricahua Mountains, near Portal, Arizona, a “sky island” range isolated in the desert—were ingredients from which he fashioned the locales of the novel. They were also places where he worked on the novel. The idea that his vision of his new book, his “brew of individual fancy,” awaited only the injection of local-colorist details—Canadian or Mexican would have served as well—advances an idea that Nabokov liked to propagate, that he was on the Mozartian side of things, his imagination supreme, largely self-contained. In fact the American context was determinative. It fed meaning and amplitude into fancy’s brew. The dead scrap he had brought from Europe49 lived on, revived copiously, in America. The attempted burnings might have been uneasy reactions to how alarming was that growth.
America contributed specifics, and many readers respond with shocked delight to the en passant travelogue of their country at midcentury, filmed in period Technicolor as well as in noir black and white. America contributed its Promethean forwardness as well. America did go the whole hog. It had not invented explicitness, but its authors displayed an affinity for going beyond, for bringing into conversation forbidden things. Wilson was a new recruit50 to sexual frankness in fiction, joining such living predecessors and successors as Henry Miller, William Faulkner of Sanctuary, Norman Mailer of The Naked and the Dead, Jack Kerouac of The Town and the City and On the Road, and William Burroughs of Junkie and Naked Lunch. Nabokov assimilated to this immodest cadre. As he said in his afterword, “I am trying to be an American51 writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy.” He meant the right to represent American vulgarity when needed, but also an American disposition to tell, to expose.
Postcard sent by Nabokov to Wilson from Wyoming, summer 1949
He was not a hack, warmly pandering. He was writing the book that had come to him that he felt the need to write. While he wrote, his Russian memoir appeared, and despite its rollout in the New Yorker and other magazines, Speak, Memory was another “dismal flop” in the market, bringing him “fame but little money52,” he told his sister. To reach53 America’s mythic mass audience might have begun to seem impossible.
America contributed a cathexis as well. In France in the fall of ’39, when he wrote The Enchanter and then read it one night to four friends, a pedophile’s story, complete with description of desperate flight with child, did not live on the page. In America, the resonance was different. Like the author of a story about bulls and capes who changes the setting to Spain, Nabokov inherited a stage, and the sad, abbreviated flight in The Enchanter became as large as he was able to make it. Mark Twain, another writer he hardly deigned to notice (“in the matter of54 the American Academy …,” he wrote Wilson at about this time, “I know nothing whatsoever … and at first confused [the Academy] with a Mark Twain horror that almost obtained my name”), was the acknowledged master of that literary domain. Twain wrote within a tradition of slave narratives, as well as the genre of Indian abduction accounts, stories of frontier settlers taken and carried away. The white captives were often female. The first popular book of the kind was Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, about a Massachusetts wife taken by Narragansett Indians during King Philip’s War (1675–78). It became the first American bestseller55 and appeared in thirty editions56 over the next 150 years. By 1800, seven hundred57 captivity narratives had been published, and early American novelists, such as Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, worked the theme ingeniously. Sexual exploitation was always a subtext. Nabokov’s interest in such accounts—at any rate, his acquaintance with the genre—follows from his reading of Pushkin, who in 1836 wrote a long, enthusiastic review58 of the French translation of a book called The Narrative of John Tanner (a.k.a. The Falcon: A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America). Writing in a Russian journal he co-edited, Pushkin told the story of an American child abducted by Shawnee at age nine, then sold to an Ottawwaw woman whose son had died. The “absolute artlessness59 and humble simplicity of the narrative vouch for its truth,” Pushkin said, and he liked especially the description of an animal called “the moose60,” which he identified as “the American reindeer.”
The Leatherstocking Tales, cover art by C. Offterdinger
Nabokov’s immersion in Pushkin was lifelong but reached its height61 in the years when he worked on Lolita, when he was also translating Eugene Onegin. He might have read Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, the best of the Leatherstocking Tales, as Pushkin had done62; like Mayne Reid, who wrote a novel called The White Squaw (1868), Cooper embroidered the female abduction theme. Probably Nabokov’s path to channeling this mode is best explained, however, not by examining literary influences but by invoking the imponderables of inspiration. As quick as he was to pick up American slang, or to become knowing about American locales, he was intuitive and subtle in knowing what tale to tell63—a very old tale, as it happened, provocative, formally simple, and outward-facing, toward the American vastness.
Summer of ’49, he traveled to Salt Lake City to take part in a writers’ conference. His fellow panelists included Wallace Stegner, the Western novelist best known for The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), and Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel), former political cartoonist and author of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) and Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949). John Crowe Ransom, editor of the Kenyon Review, was also there; Nabokov found him smart64 and likable, and he was taken also with Dr. Seuss. The Nabokovs stayed at a sorority house on the University of Utah campus. They had driven west in their own car, a ’46 Oldsmobile, their first cross-country drive since the trip to Stanford. Véra had taken lessons in Ithaca. She was nervous about driving across herself, so they hired one of Nabokov’s Cornell students, a nineteen-year-old named Richard Buxbaum65, to spell her at the wheel.
Buxbaum was brought along also to keep Dmitri company. The boys spent time talking about girls. At the conference, each proposed to pick out a girl “to have for the duration” of their stay in Salt Lake. Buxbaum drove more than Véra did, with Dmitri or Véra beside him in the front seat; Nabokov was always in back with his notebook. The route they took was direct, resembling the route66 taken by Humbert Humbert on his second long journey with Lolita, from the Northeast across Ohio, then “the three states beginning with ‘I,’ ” then Nebraska—“ah, that first whiff67 of the West!” Humbert enthuses, his ultimate goal being California, where he intends to spirit Lolita across the Mexico border. The nonfictional travelers68 stayed at motels, as do the fictional ones; the boys shared a room, the grown-ups another—the grown-ups, Buxbaum noted, preferring rooms with separate beds.
“We traveled very leisurely,” it says in the novel, and Nabokov and his party took eleven days to reach Salt Lake, a moderate pace at the time. Lolita “passionately desired to see the Ceremonial Dances” along the Continental Divide, Native American dances; unbeknownst to Humbert, she plans to escape there, into the custody of Quilty, her other pedophile suitor. They are welcomed to motels by signs that read,
“We wish you69 to feel at home while here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you… . We consider our guests the Finest People of the World.”
Humbert recalled paying “ten for twins,” that “flies queued outside at the screenless door and … scrambled in,” that “the ashes of our predecessors still lingered in the ashtrays” and “a woman’s hair70 lay on the pillow.” Fictional ’49 probably resembled real, and vice versa; Humbert registers a contemporary change in roadside architecture, that “commercial fashion71 was [for] ca
bins to fuse and gradually form [a] caravansary, and … a second story was added, and a lobby grew in, and cars were removed to a communal garage.”
Buxbaum found Véra fascinating. She was a graceful woman with “beautiful bones72—a lovely person, lovely.” Nabokov reminded him of other Eastern European gentlemen he had known, with savoir faire and languages. (Buxbaum’s family were German-speaking Jews who had arrived in ’39. His father was a doctor in Canandaigua, New York; he worked at a Mohawk reservation on the Quebec border.)
The conference over, the group headed for the Tetons, where Nabokov had some collecting he wanted to do. In advance, he had conferred with Alexander B. Klots73, a lepidopterist at the AMNH; Klots sought to allay Véra’s fears of grizzly bear encounters, warning, though, that moose could be aggressive and “I would rather meet ten bears74 with cubs.” South of the Tetons75, where the Hoback River joins the Snake, they traveled east and stayed at the Battle Mountain Ranch, where Nabokov busily collected. They stayed longer, for more than a month, at the Teton Pass Ranch, in Wilson, Wyoming, seven miles west of Jackson and south of the high mountains. Buxbaum left them here, to hitchhike back east, but first the two boys tried to climb Disappointment Peak, a subsidiary summit of the Grand Teton. They failed but had an adventure76. They wore tennis shoes and began climbing the shattered rock of the mountain without mountaineering equipment. Somewhere short of the nearly twelve-thousand-foot summit, they were afraid to climb any higher but faced a jump from one ledge to a lower one in order to descend, with a misstep promising death. It took two hours for one of them to summon the nerve, the other then following.