by Robert Roper
The book is decidedly about Europe, in the person of a perverted sophisticate, debauching a child who decidedly symbolizes America. Nabokov conceived of a way to make quotidian reality compelling: that reality was so concerned for order36, so conventional and outwardly prim, that if one entered it via the back door, off the dark alley under the awful sign The rape of children, one set off profound reverberations. Efforts to suppress the book attended its U.S. publication three years after its Paris debut, and those efforts continue to this day. The turmoil over the sexual abuse of children in 1980s–90s America, a kind of neo-Salem-witch-trials hysteria, suggests how invested with meaning the issue remained and remains. Nabokov sensed that depth of meaning, or luckily stumbled on it. One would have to believe, as no one does seriously anymore, that a novel can affect an entire culture—can focus its darkest dreams, its foulest fantasies—to say that Lolita led directly to the contemporary redefinition of sexual abuse as soul murder, as a crime as vile as any. No doubt the reckoning with child abuse in America would have taken place regardless, but Lolita gave it faces: it was this little girl, a child born Dolores Haze, whose youth was being pillaged, and this handsome, over-intellectual foreigner who was raping her every day—every day.
13.
Humbert, in the period before Lolita at last gets away from him, by means of a smart plan devised by her and Quilty (“the Beast,” as Humbert calls him), goes far into full-on paranoia, or “persecution mania1,” as he has it. Just before his worst imaginings come true, this mania relaxes:
After all, gentlemen2, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments … images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain—and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges … hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law.
They are in the mountain town of Elphinstone, in a western state. The previous days have been a nightmare, Humbert enduring a heart attack (among other woes) as their journey offers hints of a conspiracy against his hopes. He is on the verge of a kind of revelation. That revelation attends the collapse of his plans for continued ownership of a child, continued sexual access to her; in possibly his most loathsome musing, Humbert has earlier thought that
around 1950 I3 would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated [but that] with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind … was strong enough to distinguish … salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.
He is being facetious—isn’t he? But in certain moods, Humbert does conceive of monstrous things. The “sleepiness” and sheer size of America have induced in him fantasies of godlike control, extending even to the breeding of future slaves. Promethean schemes go with the land. America has a bad history of this, one of the most powerful fictional representations of it to be found in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner’s ninth novel, by some reckonings his last great novel, a fierce account of racialism and monomania. Nabokov nowhere mentions that work, but the story of a mad patriarch breeding offspring into the incestuous future performs Humbert’s fantasy very closely, against the backdrop of an historic horror. (The high Southern gothic of the novel would no doubt have awakened his ridicule, always poised to be applied to Faulkner.)
The trip in ’51 brought him to Telluride. It is a few miles outside fictional Elphinstone, after Lolita’s escape, that Humbert has his revelation:
An attack of abominable nausea4 forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway… . After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a lone stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway.
In a letter to Wilson, Nabokov set the actual scene:
I went to Telluride5 (awful roads, but then—endless charm, an old-fashioned, absolutely touristless mining town full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000', to 10000', with the town and its tin roofs and self-conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are the voices of children playing …).
“A steep slope high above Telluride,” looking down upon the mountain town
Don Stallings, his collector friend, had had good luck around Telluride, and so did Nabokov:
My heroic wife6 … drove me through the floods and storms of Kansas [for the purpose] of obtaining more specimens of a butterfly I had described from eight males, and of discovering its female. I was wholly successful in that quest, finding all I wanted on a steep slope high above Telluride—quite an enchanted slope, in fact, with hummingbirds and humming moths visiting the tall green gentians that grew among the clumps of a blue lupine, Lupinus parviflorus.
Humbert, poised on his parapet, contemplates the drop:
Small grasshoppers spurted7 out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms8 and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system… . I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and … behind it all, great timbered mountains.
Here the pedophile has his epiphany. Those are children’s voices, children making that harmony. He is heartbroken and heart-diseased but not self-pitying now—ruing not the loss of his slave so much as what he has done to her. He perceives a quality “divinely enigmatic9” in the voices, and the man prepared to breed more captives with a stolen child’s body seems far away—if you can believe him.
The notes of heavenly unison, unusual in Nabokov, place us close to another tradition. Nabokov would not have agreed with—probably would have parodied—Emerson’s claim that “every natural fact10 is a symbol of some spiritual fact,” but Humbert mourns and moons with a full failing heart, his position above an earthly paradise, bathed in the music of childish goodness, securing for him rare moments of full humanity. They are transcendental moments, transcendental in the sense of time-tethered, changeable, worldly facts giving rise to ideas of a realm of value that does not change, that achieves perfection. Humbert joins himself briefly to that realm—then, when he leaves his enchanted hillside, Lolita plunges into its tragic final act.
Nabokov’s travels of ’51 and ’52 (a little less so ’53), full of pleasure and diversion, good insects, weeks of doing exactly what he wanted, represent a kind of apotheosis. He was married to a woman he loved and who loved him, their child was turning out well, showing signs of unusual talent11 (singer, debater), and the Oldsmobile was ever ready to take them farther on America’s amiable roads. This happy phase, a testament to his ability to be comfortable in his own skin, in whatever surroundings, is part of the lore of Lolita. He was not a tortured artist writing a masterwork in a garret; no, he was a family man, an eater at common lunch counters, a man like you or me.
Leaving that improbable conclusion aside, his passage, in his fiction, through places that betray an up-front Americanness—a quality, often, of cheapjack vulgarity, of corny coziness packaged for sale (with, in the background, mystic meadows and mountains)—transforms those places. The transformation is again in an American direction. As he reflects reality back at readers, he renders it as deep and full of mystery; the forest surrounding the town in the first great American short story, Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” is this kind of place, too, pulsing with demons and trickery, a gloomy breeding ground of conspiracy
and paranoia, possibly illusional. Stories of evil and of compromised innocence12 are not rare in American literature, nor are stories of a belief that deforms reality. The brooding, enigmatic something that Nabokov finds at large has spoken to others, too.
His summer contentment, noted in letters to friends, coexisted with anxieties. Dmitri would soon be at college. “I want to ask your advice,” he wrote Harry Levin of Harvard:
Dmitri has set his heart13 on [your university]. He is in his junior year of prep school now and so will be ready to enter … in spring 1951. I believe démarches are made by fathers at the end of the junior year and would be very grateful to you for any advice you could give me as to the customary procedure.
Levin did not acknowledge any impropriety in this approach—itself a subtle démarche. He replied,
It’s always a pleasure14 to get your annual letter. It’s also a pleasure to think that Dmitri—to whom we took a great liking, when we glimpsed him last fall in his new and semi-adult phase—is likely to be at Harvard fairly soon. I have his cousin Ivan, also a nice and bright boy, in one of my freshman classes… . The person to address about Mitya’s application is Dr. Richard M. Gummere, Director of Admissions… . If any references are required, I should be honored to stand as an enthusiastic godparent.
That was how things were done in America! Dmitri was duly admitted to Harvard, although without a scholarship. Nabokov wrote Roman Grynberg, who often loaned him large sums, that he was worried:
I’ll tell you in complete honesty15, the thought that I would not be able to afford his Harvard education takes a lot out of me. I just sent a story to the New Yorker and if they take it … then it’ll be just enough to pay in December around five hundred for his education, and for ourselves to scrape out of the sludge we’ve become trapped in. But if it doesn’t sell then for at least some of the sum I will turn to you.
The New Yorker did take the story, “Lance,” Nabokov’s last short story16, which is about, among other things, the fear felt by the parents of an adventurous young man who climbs mountains and travels to other planets. Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor in chief, complained that he could not understand it17, but Katharine White argued for it, and the magazine published it after Ross’s sudden death.
Restored by his vacations, Nabokov was also impoverished18 by them. His western trips represented the re-embrace of an avocation that had never earned him much, and over the years he noticed that summer was often a time of feeling especially broke19. Though appreciating Cornell, he soon complained of being underpaid. He asked for advances against his salary, and he began looking for other positions20—at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford. Speak, Memory, not selling well, had “already brought me 13–14 thousand” from magazine excerpts, he told Grynberg, but his new novel could not be published that way—too scandalous. In any case, the magazine money was “long since21 spent.”
At midcentury, Nabokov was half a century old. He had dentures top and bottom. In May ’50 he wrote, “I have to go to Boston to have six lower teeth extracted. My plan is to go thither … Sunday the 28th, grunt at the dentist’s … Monday and Tuesday and perhaps Thursday … then mumble back22, toothless, to Ithaca.” When returning from his summers, he glowed with good health, but there were collapses. “I am ill,” he wrote Wilson upon his return in September ’51.
The doctor says23 it is a kind of sunstroke. Silly situation: after two months of climbing, shirtless, in shorts, in the Rockies, to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn. High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.
He often complained of poor sleep24, and the separate bedrooms he and his wife kept were at least in part so he could pace or write in the middle of the night. He was under great pressure. It was mostly self-generated: to write wonderful things, to do so now. He had the beginnings of a devoted audience, mostly via The New Yorker; as he told Wilson, “The letters from private individuals25 I get are, in their wild enthusiasm, ridiculously incommensurable” with the treatment he got from publishers, who failed to push his books. Great things, and great success, were possible. In ’51, he witnessed the extraordinary breakout of another New Yorker writer, J. D. Salinger26, who in ’46 had published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” a story introducing a character called Holden Caulfield. Salinger was the rare author of his time of whom Nabokov did not speak with disrespect. Stories published by Salinger, in various magazines, introduced his signature concern for adolescence and for young men entranced by younger girls27; among aspects of his style that might have appealed to Nabokov are his shaggy-dog plots and his quirky, imaginative accounts of the flow of thought. His use of slang28, like Nabokov’s, is choice. Both authors venture29 into sex talk, and both find a fertile subject in postwar teenagerhood.
Nabokov’s emergence, its crucial stage, coincided exactly with Salinger’s. Eleven chapters of the future Speak, Memory appeared in the New Yorker just in the years (1948–50) when Salinger was publishing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” the run of stories that made him a coming star. In ’48, the magazine offered Salinger a first-refusal deal30 of the kind Nabokov had gotten in ’44. Salinger worked on The Catcher in the Rye (1951), as Nabokov did Lolita, off and on for years31. Each book seems vaguely aware of the other. Both invoke an America in which to write about magical young girls is somehow a necessary thing—a key to what is.
Holden’s sister, Phoebe, is the object of her brother’s immense, protective devotion:
She has nice, pretty little ears32. In the wintertime, her [red hair is] pretty long… . Sometimes my mother braids it and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s really nice, though. She’s only ten. She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her. I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about.
Holden’s voice is the marrow of his novel. Just so Humbert’s. Among the attractions of Humbert’s is that he describes people without common decency or restraint; Holden, too, is funny when most harsh, usually about adults. Scholars have so far failed to detect parodies of The Catcher in the Rye in Lolita, but Holden’s ambling, self-reflexive, morally troubled voice, an instrument for negotiating a way out of sexual fear, among other things, suggests Humbert’s gleeful sexual ravenousness turned on its outrageous head:
The only trouble is, she’s a little too affectionate sometimes. She’s very emotional, for a child33… . Something else she does, she writes books all the time. Only, she doesn’t finish them. They’re all about some kid named Hazel Weatherfield—only old Phoebe spells it “Hazle.” Old Hazle Weatherfield is a girl detective. She’s supposed to be an orphan, but her old man keeps showing up. Her old man’s always a “tall attractive gentleman about 20 years of age.” That kills me. Old Phoebe. I swear to God you’d like her.
Late in the story, Holden returns from boarding school and sneaks into his sister’s room. The mention of Phoebe having a part in a school play, as does Lolita Haze—like the name “Hazle” for Phoebe’s alter ego, an “orphan” whose “old man keeps showing up”—and the length of the bedroom scene, a morally glowing inversion of the morally appalling bedroom scene in Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters, suggest that Nabokov read Salinger or in some way imbibed his novel’s vapors. Holden watches his sister asleep:
She was laying there34 … with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It’s funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they’re asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don’t. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right.
Humbert gazes upon his little girl:
Clothed in one of her old nightgowns35, my
Lolita lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae.
He has given her a sleeping potion. But it isn’t strong enough:
The whole [drug-giving] had had for object36 a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position.
Humbert soon does to Dolly something that Holden, in his fragile emotional state, might have found unbearable to hear or even think about. For both, a certain period of childhood—nymphethood for Humbert, and for Holden those years when a child comes out with things that “just kill” you—is a window upon radiance. If it makes sense to speak of an American zeitgeist, then these two seem to have partaken of something within it, maybe of the same thing—each, of course, in his own way.
Salinger offers a tart account of Holden’s boarding school, called Pencey Prep. Nabokov, generating new book ideas even as he labored at Lolita, made a mental note to write about St. Mark’s37, Dmitri’s un-favoritest school, in the second volume of autobiography he was contemplating. While Lolita was under way, he also applied for a Guggenheim to finance the translation of Eugene Onegin. This work, with scholarly38 notes, would take him a little over a year to complete, he confidently told Henry Moe, of the foundation.