Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita (Humbert’s Journal, for example) misled some of my first readers into assuming that this was going to be a lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why not all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.
Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, “realistic” sentences (“He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.” Etc.). Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as “Old Europe debauching young America,” while another flipper saw in it “Young America debauching old Europe.” Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond here, had the naïveté to write me that Part Two was too long. Publisher Y, on the other hand, regretted there were no good people in the book. Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail.
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master’s chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown. I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called “powerful” and “stark” by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.
Another charge which some readers have made is that Lolita is anti-American. This is something that pains me considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considerations of depth and perspective (a suburban lawn, a mountain meadow) led me to build a number of North American sets. I needed a certain exhilarating milieu. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. But in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no intrinsic difference between Palearctic manners and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian from Chicago can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke. I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy. On the other hand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him. And all my Russian readers know that my old worlds—Russian, British, German, French—are just as fantastic and personal as my new one is.
Lest the little statement I am making here seem an airing of grudges, I must hasten to add that besides the lambs who read the typescript of Lolita or its Olympia Press edition in a spirit of “Why did he have to write it?” or “Why should I read about maniacs?” there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my book much better than I can explain its mechanism here.
Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one’s private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one’s book. I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted—although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached, by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something on the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de Milord Grosvit. That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. And yet one of my very few intimate friends, after reading Lolita, was sincerely worried that I (I!) should be living “among such depressing people”—when the only discomfort I really experienced was to live in my workshop among discarded limbs and unfinished torsos.
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.
November 12, 1956
Notes
The word or passage in the text to which each annotation refers is indicated by two numbers, the first giving the page and the second the number in the margin of the text. The numbering begins anew on each page and disrega
rds chapter divisions. All page references to other Nabokov books are to the Vintage paperback editions.
FOREWORD
two titles: the term “white widowed male” occurs in the case histories of psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating confessional novel, such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography (see Duk Duk). Although Nabokov could hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel’s being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe and other “eighteenth-century sexcapades” (to use Clare Quilty’s description of Sade’s Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la vertu [… The Misfortunes of Virtue]).
preambulates: to make a preamble, introduce.
“Humbert Humbert”: in his Playboy interview (1964), Nabokov said, “The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns.” Like James Joyce, Nabokov fashions his puns from literary sources, from any of the several languages available to him, from obsolete words, or the roots of arcane words. If the associations are rich enough, a pun succeeds in projecting a theme central to the fiction, in summarizing or commenting on the action. In both The Gift (1937) and the 1959 Foreword to the English translation of Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), Nabokov mentions Discours sur les ombres, by Pierre Delalande, “the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book … [and] whom I invented.” Delalande’s Discours provided the epigraph for Invitation—“Comme un fou se croît Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels” [“As a madman deems himself God, we deem ourselves mortal”]—and Nabokov’s entire corpus might be described as a “Discourse on Shadows, or Shades.” John Shade is the author of the poem Pale Fire. In a rejected draft of his poem, he writes, “I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost ‘man’ / In Spanish …”—an accurate etymological pairing (hombre > ombre) and a resonant pun that figuratively places bombre in ombre—a card game popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and sets man to playing in Nabokov’s “game of worlds” (see this is only a game). Humbert was brought up on the French Riviera; pronounced with a French accent, his name partakes of these shadows and shades. By “solipsizing” Lolita, Humbert condemns her to the solitary confinement of his obsessional shadowland. “She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland,” says Humbert, who, by choosing to chase the figurative shadows that play on the walls of his “cave,” upends Plato’s famous allegory. Although Humbert has had the benefit of a journey in the sunny “upper world”—a Riviera boyhood, in fact, and a full-sized wife or two—he nevertheless pursues the illusion that he can recapture what is inexorably lost. As Humbert demonstrates, illusions are realities in their ability to destroy us. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,” writes John Shade in the opening lines of Pale Fire, while in Nabokov’s poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry” (1945), the speaker says:
My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.
False shadows turn to track me as I pass
and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,
creep in to blot the freshly written page
and read the blotter in the looking-glass.
And in the dark, under my bedroom window,
until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day
presses its starter, warily they linger
or silently approach the door and ring
the bell of memory and run away.
Seventeen years later in Pale Fire the Shadows are the Zemblan “regicidal organization” who dispatch Gradus, one of whose aliases is d’Argus, to assassinate the exiled King Charles (Kinbote). But the Shadows’ secret agent accidentally kills Shade instead. Lolita offers the converse, for “Shade” (Humbert) purposely kills his “shadow” (Clare Quilty). Thus the delusive nature of identity and perception, the constricting burdens of memory, and a haunting sense of mutability are all capsuled in a reverberating pun.
solecism: an irregularity or impropriety in speech and diction, grammar or syntax. Also in conduct, and therefore not an unwarranted definition in Humbert’s instance.
presented intact: it is important to recognize how Nabokov belies the illusion of “realism” which both Ray and Humbert seem to create. See Lolita, light of my life and I have only words to play with.
cognomen: its current definition, “a distinguishing nickname,” is fundamental, and the humorous incongruity of using so high-toned a Latin-ate word is heightened by its original meaning: “The third or family name of a Roman citizen.”
this mask: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” Humbert later asks. In his Foreword to Pale Fire, Kinbote says of Shade: “His whole being constituted a mask.”
remain unlifted: not quite; although the “real” name is never revealed, the mask does slip. See Chapter Twenty-six, the shortest in the book.
her first name: Lolita’s given name is “Dolores.” See Dolores.
“H.H.” ’s crime: the murder of Clare Quilty (here); Humbert’s grotesque alter ego and parodic Double. Humbert will henceforth be identified by his initials.
1952: a corrected author’s error (“September-October 1952,” instead of the 1958 edition’s “September”). The following locations in the text contain corrections which are detailed in the Notes: [PART ONE] fwd.1, frw.2, c5.1, c6.1, c8.1, c8.2, c11.1, c13.1, c27.1, c27.2, c32.1, [PART TWO] c1.1, c2.1, c7.1, c10.1, c11.1, c11.2, c12.1, c14.1, c19.1, c20.1, c20.2, c24.1, c26.1, c26.2, c27.1, c36.1, and c36.2. The 1958 Putnam’s edition was set in type from the 1955 Olympia Press edition. The latter contains many minuscule mistakes (e.g., punctuation) which were carried over into the Putnam’s edition and identified only when the present text was in page proof. Although these errors have been corrected, it was impossible to describe them separately in the Notes. However, since the present edition follows the Putnam’s format exactly, save for the pagination (each Putnam page is two higher), assiduous students of such textual matters can easily identify these corrections by collating the two texts, as follows, adding two to get the Putnam’s page: p. 5, line sixteen; p. 31, line fourteen; p. 40, last line; p. 63, lines three and twenty-six; p. 73, line nineteen; p. 82, last line; p. 111, line seventeen; p. 136, line thirteen; p. 141, lines six and seven; p. 150, line twenty-five; p. 156, line six; p. 158, line sixteen; p. 161, line fifteen; p. 164, line nine; p. 179, line three; p. 180, line nine; p. 218, line ten; p. 226, line seven; p. 239, line thirteen; p. 243, line twenty-three; p. 255, line five; p. 262, line twenty-five; p. 275, line four; p. 276, line thirty-three; and p. 278, line two.
“real people”… “true story”: in the Afterword, Nabokov mentions his “impersonation of suave John Ray”; but by mocking the conventional reader’s desire for verisimilitude, as Nabokov does in the opening paragraphs of Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift, Dr. Ray here expresses the concerns of a novelist rather than psychologist, suggesting that the mask has not remained totally in place. There are subtle oscillations between the shrill locutions and behavioristic homilies of Ray and the quite reasonable statements of an authorial voice projected, as it were, from the wings. Note “Vivian Darkbloom” underlines this, while moral apotheosis and Blanche Schwarzmann–his singing violin suggest other instances of that presence.
sophomore: a corrected misprint (a period instead of the 1958 edition’s semicolon after “sophomore”).
Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller”: Lolita’s married name, first revealed here. The covert disclosure of Lolita’s death is significant, for the announcement that the three main characters are now dead challenges the “old-fashioned reader” ’s idea of “story”: to reveal the outcome before the story even be
gins is of course to ruin it. The heroine of “The Beauty” (1934), an untranslated Nabokov story, also dies in childbirth within a year after her marriage (noted by Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Act [Boston, 1967], p. 330).
1952: for a hermetic allusion to this crucial year, see interrelated combinations.
Gray Star: it is most remote, for there is no town by this name anywhere in the world. Nabokov calls it “the capital town of the book.” A gray star is one veiled by haze (Lolita’s surname), and H.H. recalls “the haze of stars” that has always “remained with me.” See haze of stars and fly to Jupiter.
“Vivian Darkbloom” … “My Cue”: “Vivian Darkbloom” is Clare Quilty’s mistress and an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov” (see my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, p. 216, and my 1968 Denver Quarterly article, p. 32 [see bibliography]). “Vivian Darkbloom” is the author of “Notes to Ada,” which is appended to the 1970 Penguin paperback edition and the 1990 Vintage edition. Among her alphabetical cousins are “Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine,” who appears in Speak, Memory (p. 218), and “Mr. Vivian Badlook,” a photographer and teacher of English in the 1968 translation of the 1928 novel King, Queen, Knave (p. 153)—and they all descend from “Vivian Calmbrood” (see Field, op. cit., p. 73), the alleged author of The Wanderers, an uncompleted play written by Nabokov in Russian (the anagram is helped along by the fact that in Cyrillic, the c is a k). One act of it was published in the émigré almanac Facets (1923), as an English play written by Vivian Calmbrood in 1768 and translated by V. Sirin (the pen name under which all of Nabokov’s Russian work appeared). In a discussion in Ada (1969) of Van Veen’s first novel, Letters from Terra, mention is made of the influence “of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine” (p. 344).
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 43