by Brian Boyd
He now advances to his mother’s last years in Prague, without Vyra, without her husband, without her favorite son, in the “pitiable lodgings” where she has no large household to look after or to look after her:
A soapbox covered with green cloth supported the dim little photographs in crumbling frames she liked to have near her couch. She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.
(SM 49–50)
This sequence of treasured memories and anticipated losses, of disappointed hopes and new unexpected losses has not quite come to an end, for Nabokov’s loss of his mother is still to come. Discussing his predormitary hallucinations at the start of the chapter, he had insisted, “What I mean is not the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will; that is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make” (SM 33). Now at the end of the chapter, after a last image of the two wedding rings on his mother’s fourth finger, her own and her husband’s, too big for her, but tied to hers by a bit of black thread, he returns in a sense to that beginning, as he faces her death and his father’s:
Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
(SM 50)
By structuring his chapters as he does, by decoupling chronology, by refusing to follow the strict sequence of before and after, Nabokov demonstrates the mind’s power to range within and beyond its experience. He shows us storing up the present, aware that we will never have direct access to it again except in memory; he shows us anticipating loss and yet never able to foresee quite how it will happen; he saturates even the earliest phase of his past with the knowledge of future upheaval yet frees it from the tyranny of succession. He reflects that the time we live through, once it slips into the past, “ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events,” as he phrases it in Ada, and becomes instead “a constant accumulation of images,” out of which we can recall what we choose (Ada 545). He reveals human life as a complex interplay of anticipation and recollection, loss and restoration, incident and repetition, our previsions of future loss and our foreglimpses of later retrospection. Even in the way he shapes his chapters, Nabokov pits the powers of memory and imagination against time and suggests how much lies both within time and beyond it.
He ends the chapter with “the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction” in echo and honor of his mother’s faith (“All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead”) and in anticipation of the triumphant end of Speak, Memory. There he and Véra will lead their son down another path, as his parents had once led him, in the direction of the boat that the boy cannot yet make out but that promises a new homeland and refuge ahead. Nabokov has lost his mother, but as he walks with Véra—mother to his son, muse, sharer of his most intimate memories—he also shares his mother’s confidence in the ultimate generosity of things, in the recovery of losses in the past generation that seems somehow betokened by the gifts of the present and the promise looming ahead in the future. By the time Speak, Memory takes us down once more to the ocean’s edge, we have come a long way indeed from Colette, let alone from Annabel Leigh and the Lolita who Humbert thinks will allow him to transcend his loss.
21. Lolita: Scene and Unseen
A fellow Nabokov scholar, Tadashi Wakashima, hosting me in a smoky, fishy student bar in Kyoto in 2003 was surprised to hear me say that I still did not think I understood Lolita. I still feel much that way, though I have taught the novel for many years. If I do ever get to understand it well enough (and something is stirring), I’ll write a critical book on it. Meanwhile, my essay on the novel in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years offers my fullest reading of the whole novel. But the three essays that follow here, each sparked by a different occasion, have made me feel as if a little less in Lolita has eluded me each time.
The Modern Languages Association has a series of Approaches to Teaching famous texts. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment asked me to contribute to their Lolita volume. The following essay presents five different treatments of the same scene, in Nabokov’s novel (1955), in his screenplay (1960, 1974), in the Kubrick film (1962), in the Stephen Schiff (and Harold Pinter) screenplay, and in the Adrian Lyne film (both 1998), to help students to read more actively and to learn about artistic media, ends, means, and effects.
Students today often have more experience “reading” films than novels and naturally incline to watch the film of the book if there is one. They may also tend to accept a literary text rather passively, as if it were somehow a record of prior, even if fictional, events. They can easily unlearn that habit when they see how choice shapes every element of a scene.
I approach Lolita by asking the class to dwell on a subscene in the novel, Humbert’s first meeting with Lolita, and actual and possible film versions of such a scene, in order to engage the skills undergraduates already have; to block their inclination to think the film can substitute for the book; to draw on the critical independence of mind they readily exercise once shown different ways of telling the same story; and to develop their capacity to read and imagine actively.
Even apart from its recondite language and allusions, Lolita poses particular problems for students. The appeal of Humbert’s intelligence, wit, and wry self-consciousness can seduce some, female as well as male, into seeing Humbert’s and Lolita’s story almost entirely from Humbert’s point of view. Some even go as far as thinking that a girl as ordinary as Lolita is lucky to be loved so passionately by someone as discriminating and devoted as Humbert. Although students can be dislodged from such positions readily enough when made to consider Humbert’s recurring interest in other nymphets or in the possibility of “a litter of Lolitas” (Lolita 302) or his repeated refusal to concern himself with Lolita’s suffering, I think it better if from the outset they are primed for wariness and armed to resist Humbert’s rhetoric. The ability to look from the viewpoint of those with less eloquence, confidence, or power is one that cannot be acquired too early, and learning how clearly Nabokov manages to see from a position outside his narrator’s offers a salutary lesson in imaginative and moral independence.
In part 1, chapter 10, Humbert has arrived in Ramsdale, hoping that as a lodger in the McCoo house he can take advantage of his proximity to twelve-year-old Ginny McCoo. When he discovers the McCoo home has burnt down, he has no reason to remain in Ramsdale but cannot escape being shown over the home of the McCoos’ friend, Charlotte Haze. Every detail of the Haze home hardens his indifference into positive revulsion, until this:
I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery—“the piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.
It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polkadotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the
juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely in-drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles—the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea” in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them.
I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit vert. Au fond, ça m’est bien égal. All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and—
“That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”
(Lolita 41–42)
How does the passage work on us, from Humbert’s viewpoint and from Nabokov’s? How does it work as comedy? As romance? How do we respond to the gap between the mundane suburban setting and Humbert’s extravagant expression of his feelings? How does Humbert’s baroque style invite us into the privileged position of his private awareness and ask us to remain amused at the gap between his sense of the scene and Charlotte’s and Lolita’s inability to perceive what he feels? How do the shifting tones of Humbert’s rhetoric operate to shape our responses? What part do the sliding times play? (And what times are there? Successively, Humbert with Annabel Leigh in 1923; first seeing Lolita in May 1947; the imagined time of fairytale; the immediacy of the moment’s impact and the protractedness of the attempt to convey it; the near “future,” first Lolita curing Humbert of all his aches then replacing Annabel; the courtroom scene Humbert still expects as he writes this in late 1952; the 1947 “present” again.) What role does fairytale play here and elsewhere in the novel? How does Nabokov work on us by inventing such a scene and establishing its connections with other parts of the book (in this case, especially via Lolita’s precursor, Annabel) and through allowing Humbert such conscious control over our responses?
After this discussion, I then invite the students to draft a screenplay scene for this first glimpse of Lolita. I ask them to consider how they might deal with the possibility that the camera could show the scene quite differently from the way Humbert presents it in prose. In the Stephen Schiff screenplay used by Adrian Lyne for his 1998 movie, the scene takes only a hundred words. How much time would you give it? What would you want Humbert’s first glimpse of Lolita to establish? (And what would you have already established, by this point in your film, of Humbert’s feelings toward young girls or nymphets?) Do you wish to render the intensity of the moment for Humbert and, if so, how? Is it important to establish his sense that Lolita is Annabel revived and if, so, how could you do this? What attitude do you want viewers to take toward this meeting? How could you keep the comedy of the disparity between Humbert’s feelings and Charlotte’s unawareness of what has changed his mind?
I especially encourage students to think and script how we might see Humbert and Lo talk to each other alone for the first time. In the Schiff screenplay such a scene follows immediately, and takes another hundred and fifty words. How much screen time would you allow for this scene? What would you want to establish in their attitudes toward each other? What responses would you want the audience to have to each character, overall and in this scene?
We then consider the two film versions, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and Lyne, to see what features of the scene they have dropped or added, and to see to what extent these differences can be attributed to the change of medium from prose to film, to the aims of the filmmakers, or to the circumstances of production.
Kubrick in 1962, I explain, had good reason to be wary of film censors and so to minimize Lolita’s youth, maximize her readiness for Humbert, yet minimize the sexual element of the relationship. How do these aims affect his handling of the scene? How does the music contribute to impact of the moment? Lyne in 1998, by contrast, had little to fear from censors and could maximize Lolita’s youth, minimize her invitation to Humbert, yet maximize the sexuality of the scene. How are these possibilities reflected in his version of the scene? And how do the conditions facing Kubrick in 1962 throw light on Nabokov’s constraints, and his aims, in a novel begun more than a decade earlier?
Stephen Schiff wrote the published screenplay of the Adrian Lyne film, but Lyne had first hired others to draft his screenplay, including playwrights of the stature of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. Schiff incorporated a couple of scenes from Pinter, including the first conversation between Humbert and Lolita, which was to follow immediately in film time though not story time from Humbert’s first seeing Lolita. The clothesline and pinging pebbles come from Humbert’s first diary entry, in the chapter of the novel following his first vision of Lolita:
HUMBERT: Yes, yes. They are beautiful, beautiful. (pause) Uh, how much was the room?
THE BACK PORCH—DAY Lolita taking clothes off a clothesline. Humbert—casually dressed, shoes off—is watching her. It is obvious he has moved in. Lolita puts the clothes in a tub, lazily brings the tub to the porch, glances at him.
LOLITA: Hi.
Sitting on the step of the porch, she scoops peaches out of a can with her hand, and eats them. The syrup drips.
HUMBERT: You like peaches.
LOLITA: Who doesn’t? You want one?
HUMBERT: No, no. I generally wait until after the sun goes down.
LOLITA: For what?
HUMBERT: Peaches.
He gazes at her bare arms. She begins to pick up pebbles with her feet and tosses them at the can. The sound of pebbles hitting the can: ping ping…
LOLITA: How come?
HUMBERT: Keeps the lions away. I learned that in Africa.
LOLITA: Learned what?
HUMBERT: About peaches.
She looks at him and grins.
LOLITA: You’re nuts.
Since Schiff retained the scene and Lyne filmed it, although he excised it in the editing room, we can presume they had aims similar to Pinter’s, at least in this scene. What do we infer of their sense of the relationship between Humbert and Lolita here? What aspects of Humbert and of Lolita in the novel does this illuminate or obscure?
We then look at the scene through one more lens, the most surprising of all. Nabokov traveled to Hollywood to write a screenplay for Kubrick in 1960, but his text was drastically rewritten at the end of the year by Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris. Nabokov received full screenplay credit, nevertheless, so that his literary reputation could serve as yet another line of defense against the forces of censorship that they feared potentially massing over the horizon. In 1974 Nabokov published his own screenplay. There the scene of the first conversation between Lolita and Humbert takes six pages. Although it incorporates “She’s a fright. An
d mean. And lame” from Humbert’s first diary entry (Lolita 43), Nabokov makes the action follow directly from Humbert’s decision to move into the Haze home. The new scene shows us Humbert not as seen by himself, debonair, impassioned, dramatic, wry but as seen from outside, creepily persistent, slyly circumspect, disconcertingly sleazy:
LOLITA: Did you see the fire?
HUMBERT: No, it was all over when I came. Poor Mr. McCoo looked badly shaken.
LOLITA: You look badly shaken yourself.
HUMBERT: Why, no. I’m all right. I suppose I should change into lighter clothes. There’s a ladybird on your leg.
LOLITA: It’s a ladybug, not a ladybird.
She transfers it to her finger and attempts to coax it into flight.
HUMBERT: You should blow. Like this. There she goes.
LOLITA: Ginny McCoo—she’s in my class, you know. And she said you were going to be her tutor.
HUMBERT: Oh, that’s greatly exaggerated. The idea was I might help her with her French.
LOLITA: She’s grim, Ginny.
HUMBERT: Is she—well, attractive?
LOLITA: She’s a fright. And mean. And lame.
HUMBERT: Really? That’s curious. Lame?
LOLITA: Yah. She had polio or something. Are you going to help me with my homework?
HUMBERT: Mais oui, Lolita. Aujourd’hui?