The Two Lolitas

by Michael Maar

  Each time, though, the last word belongs not to death but to art. Lolita and her history, sticky with marrow and blood and beautiful bright-green flies, make Humbert into a writer. The novel ends with his hope of the only refuge that he and his muse can find together: ‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’

  The great novel’s famous ending: he who survives Lolita becomes through her an artist. The tale of 1916 ends not very differently. The professor, too, is initiated into art by Lolita. When he has finished his story, the countess – who has been listening to him with closed eyes – murmurs: ‘You are a poet’.

  Might immortality smile on his Lolita too? Her only chance would be a hide-out in Nabokov’s novel. Not so small a chance in this majestic structure undermined by so many caverns and secret corridors. Appel’s commentary needs 140 closely printed pages to decipher only the most important allusions. The name Heinz von Lichberg, of course, does not occur in it. Still, there is a passage in which a tender mise en abîme appears to be concealed. Humbert watches Lolita in a circle of other nymphets by the swimming-pool, and recalls:

  … today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air – once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time – mais je divague.

  Why does Nabokov introduce this Spanish daughter of a nobleman – not the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, be it noted? No obvious function attaches to her. In the following pages she reappears inconspicuously as Lolita’s little Spanish friend. She is the ‘lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling’, who skips with Lolita. Taking his leave, Humbert flashes a smile to ‘the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess’.48 But who is smiling at whom here – Humbert at a missed chance, or his creator, with a tint to her hair, at the lesser Spanish nymphet of the aristocrat Von Lichberg? If Nabokov had wanted to hide a small thanks for certain page services, he certainly couldn’t have done so more elegantly.

  LITTLE LOTTE AND THE FÜHRER

  Back from blood-clotted art to no less bloody life. On 30 January 1933 Hitler was nominated Reichskanzler. This was the day the Nazis seized power. That evening, a nationwide broadcast hailed the torch-lit procession to the Reichskanzlei with an elated commentary. The two radio reporters looked out at the SA marching past, and ‘the vast masses of the people cheering the Führer’. Then they turned their gaze towards the Reichskanzlei. There stood Adolf Hitler:

  with a deadly stern face at the window, he has just been torn away from his work, there is no trace of triumph in his expression, or anything like it, just the serious look of labour. He has been interrupted. Yet there is a light in his eyes at this awakening of Germany, these masses of people from all walks of life, from all strata of the population, who are marching past beneath him, workers of head and hand, all class differences effaced.

  The recording can be heard in every documentary of the time: the enthusiastic voice still rings in the ear. It is the voice of Heinz von Lichberg.49 The creator of the first Lolita joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Soon afterwards he became a member of the editorial board of the Völkische Beobachter. But the next year it became clear that politically he was not entirely reliable. In February 1934, the ‘strange cultural-political activity of Herr Lichberg-Eschwege’ was attacked in a sharp letter of protest to the editorial board. Lichberg, writing as a dramatic critic, had panned a Nazi play in the official organ of the Party. The Berlin Gauleitung, the writer indignantly pointed out, had distributed several hundred tickets for the première to Party members, and the Völkische Beobachter had trampled it into the ground! In general, the recent theatre criticism of Herr von Lichberg had met with the utmost rejection from Party comrades in Berlin.50

  Perhaps they never liked this elegant apparition. From the start, a touch of the dandy and of the cosmopolitan may have not suited Party militants. Von Lichberg is represented as the very type of an immaculately clad, slightly melancholy sportsman aristocrat of the old school; now come down in the world, but withal a marvellous rider, a guest at the captain’s table on transatlantic crossings, a charmer on the dance-floor, yet preserving an air of the solitary poet about him. This type was, by the way, not so utterly distant from the young Vladimir himself.

  (Right) Heinz von Lichberg in military uniform, ‘yet preserving an air of the solitary poet about him, a type not so utterly different from the young Vladimir himself’. (Left) Nabokov in 1919, an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Despite the attack on him, Lichberg remained on the mast of the Völkische Beobachter while continuing to write light-weight feuilletons for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger. Over time he obviously wearied of these. In 1933 he was already complaining to Hans Grimm that he had become a journalistic slave to Scherl-Verlag, with which he had for years now been at odds.51 In 1935 he tried once more to establish himself as an author, publishing a novel entitled Nantucket-Lightship. Set in New York, the book sketches a portrait of the city in the Prohibition era, rich in details obviously derived from personal experience, and equally rich in racist clichés.52 Apart from a Festschrift two years later, no further publications materialized. In 1937, the same year that Nabokov left Germany, Heinz von Lichberg bade farewell to his readers.

  On 19 December 1937 a last article by him appeared in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, whose editor had asked contributors to fill out a wish-list for Christmas. The sharpness of Lichberg’s response was only thinly veiled. He respected the inquiry, of course, but it betrayed a lot of benignly childish optimism:

  You see – we human beings all run around with dream-wishes locked up in the most secret chamber of our hearts, which no one will type out for you in double spacing. Or do you think that anyone will tell you that he is inwardly gnawed by longing for a particular little Lotte or Anna?

  Even if we banish from our thoughts the name-games Nabokov will play with Lotte, Lolita and Lottelita,53 this secret, nagging longing for little Lotte gives the valediction an almost symbolic force. Heinz von Lichberg withdraws from the public sphere, and returns to the military world. There he makes a career in the Wehrmacht – or, more precisely, in the secret services. The signs are that this worldly, well-travelled journalist was recruited into the circle around Admiral Canaris, head of foreign intelligence under the Third Reich.54 At first Lichberg appears to have been assigned to work in the propaganda department of the Second Section of the Abwehr.55 By 1941 he was in the High Command of Army Group C (North), and a year later – now a Lieutenant-Colonel – he served in the Abwehr Command 204. In 1943 he was ordered to Leszno, for duties with the secret military police of the Abwehr in Poland. What he did or saw there we can only speculate: the records are thin. The following year, in February 1944, he was sent on missions unknown to Paris – the city Nabokov had fled four years before, as German troops approached. When hostilities ended, Lichberg was a British prisoner of war.56 Released in April 1946, he moved to Lübeck, where – ‘Lieutenant-Colonel (rtd) and Writer’, as styled in the German Debrett – he died without issue in March 1951. A branch of the Von Eschwege family came to an end with the author of the first Lolita.

  Nabokov in the Grand Rue, Montreux; Von Lichberg, Lt-Colonel (rtd) and Writer.

  Heinz von Lichberg’s wife survived her husband by a dozen years, dying in Neuwied in 1963.57 It is curious to think that, as the hurricane of Lolita swept the United States and then raced back towards Europe, it might have awakened in Lichberg’s widow a faint recollection of the youthful work of her husband. Lolita … didn’t that ring a bell?

  THREE POSSIBILITIES;

  GROWING DANGER

  And there remains the insistent question: would it have rightly rung a bell? What exactly are we dealing with here? Plainly, there are only thre
e possibilities, at any rate until someone shows us a fourth.58 Let us consider each in turn.

  The first is that Nabokov was completely unaware of Lichberg’s tale, and we are in the presence of one of those fortuitous coincidences which recur in the history of art and science. As we have known since Aristotle, it is inherent to the laws of probability that the improbable occurs. Paradoxically, it even occurs more frequently than we would intuitively suppose. Littlewood’s Law, called after the Cambridge mathematician, states that on average everyone can expect one wonder a month, which only goes to show that in the world of statistics, guesses based on common sense are likely to be too conservative. Why, then, should the chain of concordances between the two Lolitas, instead of being anchored in a fundamentum in re, not simply dangle from the ether of pure contingency? Why should it not simply be a splendid, mysterious, even faintly comical example of the way life displays patterns that look deliberate yet are only the caprices of coincidence? In a certain sense this would be a classic Nabokovian theme.

  And, of course, nothing can be excluded. Still, by the beards of the prophets, or of the Walzer brothers: even granted the counterintuitive aspects of probability, how likely is it that two authors would independently baptize a male couple with the same unusual surname? How likely is it that they would further create, again independently of each other, a child-woman called Lolita, and have her seduce a guest in a boarding-house? How likely that they would send, again in perfect independence of each other, the inventor of a futuristic weapon into the antechamber of the War Department? (But we anticipate.) That Nabokov should at some point in his time in Berlin have read a book in German seems, to put it moderately, somewhat less improbable.

  The second possibility takes us deep into the hypothetical.59 It runs like this. Nabokov could have come upon Lichberg’s Accursed Gioconda, and found in it a theme that had already begun to take shape in his mind. Thereafter he forgot the tale. Later, drawn to the surface by new bait, whole fragments of the Ur-Lolita rose from the depths. Nabokov remained quite unconscious of this resurgence of memory in what seemed to him to be entirely his own creation. The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia.60 Nabokov himself must have been familiar with it: according to his own account, he often read two or three books a day, which he immediately forgot.61 And with him, of course, as with any author, a part of what was written went back to what was read.

  The advantage of this variant is that it does not overwork coincidence, and spares us other difficult questions. For how could an author who was so uncommonly proud of conjuring the fictional world out of nothing have at the last moment changed the name Juanita to Lolita, if he was aware that he would be citing an unworthy predecessor? The question and the problem do not apply if he was unaware of it. The disadvantage of this hypothesis is that it is hard to square with the details of the third possibility.

  The third hypothesis is this: Nabokov indeed knew Lichberg’s tale – from 1933 onwards at the latest – and, half-inserting, half-blurring its traces, set himself to that art of quotation which Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called ‘higher cribbing’.62 The stress lies on ‘higher’. Of course, this possibility would have as little to do with plagiarism as it did in the case of Mann, who was quite self-conscious about what was he was doing, saying, with Molière, ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve’. Who would deny him or any other great author this right? Literature has always been a huge crucible, in which familiar themes are continually recast; Nabokov would have been the only author to escape this process – the first whose work was sheer material, not what a great writer made of it. Nothing of what we admire in the novel Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter.63 All of this needs no further explanation; it is self-evident to anyone who can read. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

  Much suggests that he did, once we take a small step backwards and look not just at the two girls, but at the works in which they are framed. For nowhere is it written that Nabokov could have reacted to Lichberg’s Lolita only in his novel of the same name. And no one can prescribe that he should have read only one of the fifteen tales in The Accursed Gioconda.

  One of the most remarkable scenes in Lichberg’s Lolita is the magical competition to which the brothers Walzer are challenged by an imperiously mocking Lola:

  ‘ “I will love the one who is strongest!” ’,

  ‘So they took off their jackets and their muscles swelled. But they realized they were equally strong.

  ‘ “I will love the one who is tallest!” ’ Her eyes flashed.

  ‘And lo and behold, the men grew taller and taller, their necks lengthened and grew thinner, and their sleeves burst right through to their elbows. Their faces became ugly and distorted, and I thought I could hear their bones cracking. But not by so much as a hair did one become larger than the other.’

  And lo and behold, just this grotesque scene was elaborated by Nabokov in a story he wrote in 1933. Here too there is a pair of brothers, metaphorically even ‘identical twins’,64 who suddenly begin to grow larger, and here too one of them is called Anton. The brothers threaten their new neighbour, after whom the story is called: an émigré who is harassed and finally murdered by these brutalized German philistines.65 As the story begins, the brothers visit the new tenant in his apartment. He obscurely senses the danger they represent, his thoughts wander, and like his predecessor, Lichberg’s narrator in Alicante, he slips into a day dream or vision:

  Meanwhile the brothers began to swell, to grow, they filled up the whole room, the whole house, and then grew out of it … Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear. I don’t know why they push against me; I implore you, do leave me alone.66

  As in Lichberg’s Lolita, the surreal swelling prefigures an outbreak of murderous rage. On both occasions it is jealousy which unleashes the murder, though in the new neighbour’s case jealousy that is only simulated; the real motive is hatred of the average lump for the fine-spun outsider. That the brothers have ‘fecal matter’ instead of grey cells under their skull – rather a crude image by Nabokov’s standards – indicates the intensity of his feelings in this story. It is plain that old antipathies mingled here with new impressions from the year 1933. Nabokov himself wrote later that the story originated under the grotesque and ferocious shadow of Hitler.67 If he had the brothers Walzer in his mind’s eye in depicting his swollen German thugs, would their inventor have been a beam in it?

  ATOMITE AND THE WIZARD OF OS

  That Nabokov could really have meant Lichberg is suggested by another, still more remarkable resemblance. If we leaf through The Accursed Gioconda a little further, four stories after Lolita we come upon ‘Atomit’, the penultimate tale in the collection. It contains, to our astonishment, nothing less than the plot of – The Waltz Invention.

  Heinz von Lichberg’s ‘Atomit’ narrates, in just ten pages, the following story. An inventor by the name of Bobby strolls into the United States War Department and hands over a letter and his card. He is taken to an antechamber and after a long wait, holding two packages, is ushered in to see President Wilkins. Asked by Wilkins what he can do, he replies: ‘I can end any war in a day!’ Wilkins takes him for mad: ‘My good man, you are either a clown or sick!’ But Bobby will show him that he is not bluffing. When the President tries to open his boxes, he replies: ‘If you go any further, we will both be dead in a second, and the whole Department in perhaps thirty.’ For in them is a gram of atomite: ‘This gram is fully enough to kill some hundred thousand men in about a minute, if they were standing closely enough together!’

  And the plainly not-so-mad Bobby gets ready to prove the power of his hellish machine. The demonstration, to which a mouse in a glass jar falls victim, convinces President Wilkins, who summons a Colonel Rosecamp and his servan
t Pebbs. A test of the new weapon on larger creatures is agreed for the next day. The inventor is already imagining himself a future multimillionaire. The following morning the test is successful: by remote control a quarter of a gram of atomite is released into the atmosphere, and ‘before the faint explosion could even be heard, the animals were lying at the posts to which they were tied, and moved no longer’. But a further trial, in which a still greater quantity is released, ends in disaster. Through the inexperience of the ladies who arrive too late and inadvertently set off the weapon, it is not the animals selected for the experiment but the assembled men who are killed, so that in the future, too, war ‘will last somewhat longer than a single day’.

  Compressed, such is the dreadfully silly (and dreadfully misogynist) humorous tale ‘Atomit’, in which – as in Lichberg’s ‘Lolita’ – the first contours of a work by Nabokov appear to be sketched. For how does The Waltz Invention, to whose prophetic ‘atomystique’ Nabokov later proudly pointed, begin?68

  A man presents himself at the War Ministry and extols a machine he has invented to unleash an explosion of unimaginable power. Indeed, when this new-fangled weapon is deployed in the third act, an entire city is wiped out – ‘Six hundred thousand! In one instant!’69 Naturally, at the beginning the Minister does not believe a word the inventor says. He takes him for ‘just plain crazy’ or, indeed, a ‘clown!’70 – until, that is, the inventor offers his first proof by blowing up a mountain at a distance. In this first demonstration too, only small creatures are killed – not a trivial mouse, as in ‘Atomit’, but elegant lizards (at the end of Lichberg’s story, a donkey is mentioned; in Nabokov, it is a ‘snow-white gazelle’71). After this initial demonstration, interest in acquiring the wonder-weapon grows by leaps and bounds. The Minister – he too accompanied by a Colonel and a servant (not Pebbs, but ‘Hump’)72 – realizes the advantages possession of such a remote-controlled weapon would afford. Further tests are agreed with the inventor, which prove equally successful. The last doubts removed, the millions the inventor of ‘Atomit’ had prematurely hoped for are promptly offered to Walzer/Waltz.