Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

  That is fun: the extravagance of the profession of passion, the extravagance of the phrasing. But the artifice seems so pronounced by that third sentence that while it captivates by its lilt and amuses by its comic clatter, it seems to drown out sense. In fact, Christopher Ricks points out that what sense you can see seems suspect: in an English “t” the tongue taps the alveolar ridge, not the teeth. Julian Barnes takes up Ricks’s point in Flaubert’s Parrot when he quotes this sentence in a catalogue of mistakes in literature. But the mistake is theirs: there is very meticulous sense here: Nabokov is defining as patiently as Tolstoy—OK, not that patiently, but as patiently as he can—or rather he has Humbert explain in his exuberant way that Lolita’s name is to be pronounced with a Spanish “t,” not a thick American one: Low-leed-uh.

  Behind the pattern, there is sense. And behind that, more sense: Lolita was conceived on a honeymoon in Vera Cruz, and her name is her parents’ memento of the occasion, along with “a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin” and “some more Mexican trash” in the hallway of the Haze home that confirm Humbert’s repugnance at the idea of lodging there until he sees Lolita herself. And those words that had seemed all pattern prove as aptly related to source as to sense or subject: Humbert fusses over the pronunciation of Lolita’s name because he is a scholar of Romance languages and literatures, and a pedant, at the same time as he also romanticizes himself as a lover and a poet.

  Nabokov foregrounds the artifice here as much as possible, but behind that extravagance, which he has obviously enjoyed concocting (surely no other novel starts off with a fancier verbal flourish), he nevertheless distances himself from Humbert’s style (he never began a book in his own voice with anything like this flamboyance)—which only adds another level of camouflage, another level of artifice.

  Nabokov believed that there is something deeply artful about the world not in the sense of Wilde’s patter of paradoxes, not in the sense of the postmodern cliché that all knowledge is a fictional construct, but in the sense that there seems to be detail and design that endlessly proliferate the deeper one looks into things, as if reality is almost playfully deceptive in concealing so much and allowing so much to be discovered by human eyes. And Nabokov’s sense of the artifice behind nature came from looking closely at nature as a specialist in butterflies. In foregrounding artifice as he does in Lolita’s opening lines, he is true to his sense of the ultimate reality of things, but his truth could hardly be more different from Tolstoy’s.

  As John Bayley observes, Tolstoy had an obsessive desire to see life steadily and see it whole.9 Nabokov could see that that was impossible. As a lepidopterist, he knew that the world was too rich, too endlessly special-ized in every direction, to allow for the mastery Tolstoy sought. The human mind has to work at discovering its world, and the more it discovers of the excitement of detail, the more mysterious seems its inability to understand what lies behind it all. Rather than try to capture the whole, Nabokov tries to vivify the part. So he chooses an off-center, unexpected detail: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.”

  In Stiva, or even in Lyovin, Tolstoy shows the natural egotism of the human mind and by showing it shows us with a sense of both surprise and recognition how much unites us even in what divides us. But where Tolstoy opts for the common ground, Nabokov chooses a patch of rare earth: not someone in whom we want to recognize anything of ourselves but a perverse obsessive, an eccentric, a monster. Nabokov believes in the inalienable difference of person from person, and in that he again reflects his biological training. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it, “All evolutionary biologists know that variation is itself nature’s irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are abstractions.”10

  Humbert sees how others see Lolita: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning. . . . She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.” But he wants to see her in his own way, his own terms— “But in my arms she was always Lolita”—just as he chooses his own kind of sexual pleasure in defiance of social norms.

  “But in my arms she was always Lolita”: Humbert presents himself as a romantic, a lover whose love elevates Lolita to heights beyond her mundane world of teenage moods and modes. But Nabokov, who can celebrate love as a way of partially transcending the essential isolation of the soul, introduces a love affair where Humbert pays no attention to Lolita herself, simply worshipping the image that he has fabricated and enslaving the live child whose independence he ignores. She might be called Lo to her mother, or Dolly to herself and her friends, but Humbert sees and celebrates her, appropriates her, as Lolita, a name no one else ever uses, a name Leona Toker insists we should refuse to employ if we don’t want to be complicit in Humbert’s crime.11

  Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

  Nabokov chooses to portray an exceptional, obsessive mind, fixated on his one object. But at the same time he gives Humbert astonishing mental freedom, the freedom to write with such flair, in the opening paragraph; with such a capacity for seeing other points of view while insisting on his own, as in the second paragraph; or with such self-awareness, and such a capacity for self-detachment, as he now discloses in the third paragraph. He is fixated yet free; blinded by his passion yet extraordinarily clear sighted; trapped yet uncannily mobile. And for Nabokov that is an image of us all: he perpetually celebrates the munificence, the power, the freedom of human consciousness, and he perpetually protests against its imprisonment in the self and in the here and now.

  “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” But the first-time reader hasn’t known until this line that the narrator is a murderer. Quite a clanger to find dropped on the first page. Nabokov has a very strong sense of the reader, as does Humbert himself, where Tolstoy tends to provide the illusion of transparency, a sense that we are sharing in or even living out the unmediated experience of the characters. Nabokov by contrast reminds us of our distance and continues to do so: Humbert discloses that he has murdered someone but plays a game with us as he misleads us as to whom he has murdered, thereby upending the detective story pattern and, as I suggested in the biography (VNAY 227–54), thereby also introducing the important theme of the difference between a forward and a rearward view of time, simultaneously one of the novel’s most playful and its most morally serious themes.

  “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” strikes me as an inverted echo of Ivan Karamazov in the courtroom saying: “S ubiitsa nel’zya zhe sprashivat’ krasnorechiya” (Brothers Karamazov, 12.5), which we could translate as, “You can never count on a murderer for eloquence,” an echo that can perhaps be explained by Nabokov’s thinking of Dostoevsky as a writer of detective fiction. At any rate, it’s no accident that this first invocation of the inverted detective-story pattern of the book comes between two allusions to the founder of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe.

  “In a princedom by the sea. . . . Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.” Since Humbert is about to present us with his account of his traumatic first love, on a Riviera beach—whom he names Annabel Leigh in honor of Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” about a girl torn away as a child from her lover—here he twice echoes Poe’s poem. The man he murders, Clare Quilty, will take on, in Humbert’s telling, the quality of a grim double, again like a character out of Poe. And Humbert, as a scholar of French and
English poetry, is very familiar with Poe, a writer championed by Baudelaire and more celebrated in French literary culture than in English.

  Humbert sees his life, quite self-consciously, in terms of works of art. Nabokov employs these images quite differently. Although he sees life as inherently artistic, he also signals the difference between life and art, in fact tries to define the limitations on human life by their contrast with the possibilities of art, where you can enter the mind of a character or revisit endlessly a story’s past. But Humbert tries to turn other people in his life, on his own level of being, into works of art: Lolita, as an object of celebration, a sort of miraculous willed revival of Annabel Leigh, and Quilty, as the victim of a carefully staged murder. Humbert travesties the values Nabokov sees in art: Humbert inflates his ego and reduces other people to the level of his creations, where art for Nabokov allows a kind of transcendence of the self. Humbert reduces Lolita to his creation, where Nabokov does all he can to show, behind Humbert’s rhapsodies, the live reality of her appalling life. Humbert tries to reduce Lolita to the object of his fancies, but she remains utterly remote from him, utterly inaccessible. For Nabokov art is about respecting and yet being able to enter the otherness of others, as we cannot do in life. That is what he means when he says in the afterword to Lolita: “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” (Lolita 316–17).

  “I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes.” As John Bayley points out, Tolstoy eschews biography: he refuses to give background information on his characters’ past.12 Bayley explains this as part of Tolstoy’s distaste for invention, his reluctance to create characters over whom he can have control. To put it another way, perhaps, Tolstoy can present truth to life when he shows all the complexities of a scene, the integrity of a situation, the openness of a moment, but he cannot keep that complexity, that integrity, that openness when he has to reduce to a summary. So he simply avoids biographical résumés.

  Nabokov, on the other hand, was compulsively biographical about his heroes. He might not tell a character’s history in linear sequence, but he almost invariably traces a novel’s hero somehow from birth to death or at least to his exit from the book. He was too interested in the unique pattern of human personality, the mystery of identity, the design of individual distinctiveness not to allow readers to trace in their own way the subtle and often subterranean repetitions of a protagonist’s past.

  One last sip of Lolita. Humbert tells us his father was

  a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

  In 1956 Roman Jakobson distinguished between two linguistic devices, one characteristic of verse, one of prose: metaphor and metonymy: the principle of similarity, in an image, and the principle of contiguity, of natural connectedness, in a narrative: “My love is like a red, red rose,” an image from a line of verse, and Anna Karenina’s red handbag in the scene of her death, a detail typical of prose.13 In fact, even a novelist like Dickens, famous for creating carriages or costumes that are metonymic extensions of character, also swarms with metaphor and simile. Of all great novelists, none eschews imagery as assiduously as Tolstoy, none keeps as faithfully as he to pure contiguity, to the particulars of the scene before his eyes.

  Nabokov, on the other hand, disrupts scenes with the greatest of glee. Where Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme does so programmatically, to undermine or explode what they decree to be no longer relevant habits of narrative connection, Nabokov doesn’t deny the particulars of his scenes: Humbert is writing under observation, in a prison psychiatric ward, after the murder of Quilty, and he is attempting to set down his remote past to explain his recent life. But within that he darts this way and that with the utmost ebullience and ease, in the process upsetting the distinction between metaphor and metonymy in a phrase like “I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards” (that feigns to be met-onymic, an aspect of Humbert’s situation as narrator, but is really metaphoric, only to serve a metonymic function of describing his father’s Riviera hotel). Or again, that crazily compacted aside, “picnic, lightning,” whose picnic landscape generates that crazily extended metaphor of hollows and dells that start to take on a solid, “metonymic” life of their own.

  In a paragraph like this Nabokov revels in invention, in the sheer mobility of the mind, in the endless proliferation of the quirkiest particulars, in the eccentricity and centrifugality of things and facts: “two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively.” And he pays us the compliment of expecting that we will follow his imagination with all the speed and delight of his prose. Just as Humbert here remains trapped in his psychiatric ward and in the aftermath of the past he describes, so we stay with him in his situation, but within the constraint of the here and now we find that we can be freer than we thought.

  Nothing could be further from Tolstoy’s scenic method than Nabokov’s, yet in both of them, I think, we discover ourselves.

  I have compared Tolstoy and Nabokov by close analysis—although obviously not solely by deducing from the passages in front of us. But I could do it another way—for instance, by comparing trains in Anna Karenina and cars in Lolita—and I think the conclusions will be much the same.

  In Tolstoy the trains, despite Nabokov’s diagram, are the background for the wonderful situations he prepares: Anna’s meeting with Vronsky after her arrival in Moscow and the ominous crushing by a train of the peasant whose widow Vronsky offers money in order to impress the woman who has just made such an impression on him; the romantic scene of the return to St. Petersburg, with Vronsky deliberately pursuing Anna and declaring his love on a station platform in the midst of a snowstorm, and Anna’s catching sight of her husband’s big ears as she descends from her train in St. Peters-burg; and the final catastrophe of Anna’s suicide. Again, it’s the integrity of the situations, the reflections and the involuntary interactions, that carry us into the characters’ experiences.

  Tolstoy did say that “the railroad is to travel as the whore is to love,”14 and certainly he does associate trains with the encroachment of Western ways, a loosening of the old values, an invasion that won’t be as quickly turned back as Napoleon’s. It is no accident that when Lyovin has the glimpse of Kitty returning to Russia that starts him in pursuit of her again, she is riding in a carriage, not a train. But trains are not symbols, or even obtrusive settings, so much as the place where situations evolve. Tolstoy has unusually strong opinions about many things he describes—the army in which Vron-sky serves, the restaurants in which Stiva eats, the trains in which characters meet—but in this novel he presents things objectively, whatever his private judgments, and allows situations to speak for themselves.

  Nabokov never learned to drive a car any more than Tolstoy learnt to drive a train, but in Lolita cars are everywhere, from the taxi in Paris where the cabdriver proves to be Valeria�
�s new beau, to the car that kills Charlotte, and to all that follows from her death. Humbert takes Lolita by car around the whole of the United States; on their apparent reprise of that long excursion, Quilty follows them in a prismatic series of rented roadsters; and in a final flourish, after killing Quilty, Humbert drives on the wrong side of the road. If trains in Anna Karenina seem associated with Europe, cars in Lolita represent in a sense American mobility and freedom and variety but simultaneously become a prison for Lolita as Humbert forces her to remain on the move. But again cars are not so much a symbol as a fact of the novel’s world, a fact that Nabokov renders with acute detail or eerie pattern (the spectrum of cars that Quilty hires in pursuit of Humbert), or a mixture of the real and the fantastic (the scene of Charlotte’s death, turned into a toy diagram by a driver anxious to escape charges), or a blend of the comprehensive and the wildly centrifugal—like Humbert’s catalogues of “the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex of science,” or “all cars on the road—behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun”—but never with an unobtrusive Tolstoyan solidity. There’s the town with the improbable but brilliant name of “Parkington”; or the close of the murder scene (“With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out”: as Craig Raine says, you commit a murder, and you still have to worry about parking);15 or Humbert’s mad final fling, after the murder, as he drives along the wrong side of the road: “Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear.” His drives the way he writes, breaking all the rules.