by Brian Boyd
Charlotte comes in.
CHARLOTTE: That’s where you are.
LOLITA: He’s going to help me with my homework.
CHARLOTTE: Fine. Mr. Humbert, I paid your taxi and had the man take your things upstairs. You owe me four dollars thirty-five. Later, later. Dolores, I think Mr. Humbert would like to rest.
HUMBERT: Oh no, I’ll help her with pleasure.
Charlotte leaves.
LOLITA: Well, there’s not much today. Gee, school will be over in three weeks.
A pause.
HUMBERT: May I—I want to pluck some tissue paper out of that box. No, you’re lying on it. There—let me—thanks.
LOLITA: Hold on. This bit has my lipstick on it.
HUMBERT: Does your mother allow lipstick?
LOLITA: She does not. I hide it here.
She indraws her pretty abdomen and produces the lipstick from under the band of her shorts.
HUMBERT: You’re a very amusing little girl. Do you often go to the lake shore? I shaw—I mean, I saw that beautiful lake from the plane.
LOLITA: (lying back with a sigh): Almost never. It’s quite a way. And my mummy’s too lazy to go there with me. Besides, we kids prefer the town pool.
HUMBERT: Who is your favorite recording star?
LOLITA: Oh, I dunno.
HUMBERT: What grade are you in?
LOLITA: This a quiz?
HUMBERT: I only want to know more about you. I know that you like to solarize your solar plexus. But what else do you like?
LOLITA: You shouldn’t use such words, you know.
HUMBERT: Should I say “what you dig”?
LOLITA: That’s old hat.
Pause. Lolita turns over on her tummy. Humbert, awkwardly squatting, tense, twitching, mutely moaning, devours her with sad eyes; Lolita, a restless sunbather, sits up again.
HUMBERT: Is there anything special you’d like to be when you grow up?
LOLITA: What?
(LAS 42–45)
What is different—from the students’ own versions, the film versions, the Schiff-Pinter screenplay, and the novel—in Nabokov’ screenplay? What can we infer about Nabokov’s aims in this scene in the screenplay? What does the scene suggest about his attitudes to Humbert and Lolita? How and why are these attitudes more difficult to infer from the novel? What does the difference between the screenplay and the novel suggest of Nabokov’s attitude to the audiences for each form?
What do we gain, and what do we lose, from the screenplay’s more objective view of Humbert? Although it is morally clearer—and may therefore help some of the more susceptible students not to succumb to Humbert’s seductiveness of style—it is also artistically thinner. Why? Students are encouraged to think about the purpose of the novel’s rich diction, imagery, and narrative self-consciousness; about the purpose and value of its characterization of Humbert from within; about the role of its humor. Why does Nabokov himself change the effect of the scene so dramatically from novel to screenplay? Because of a change of medium? For a different imagined audience? Because of a new attitude to the story? Does the screenplay scene make explicit what Nabokov would like his best readers to infer from the novel itself? Does it perhaps reflect his awareness that some readers had not inferred so well, that he had made Humbert even more persuasive than he intended?
How do we take the screenplay into consideration as evidence for reading the novel? Does it have the same evidentiary value as the Schiff screenplay or the Kubrick and Lyne films? If not, why not? What does our answer suggest about authors and authorial intentions and our response to them? How does it throw light on the Wimsatt-Beardsley notion of the intentional fallacy? How do Nabokov’s changes (and he made others: minor ones for the Russian translation of Lolita he prepared between 1963 and 1965 and major ones during the novel’s evolution from the 1939 Russian ur-Lolita, The Enchanter, to Lolita) affect the notion of the unity or finality of a work of art?
What does a comparison of these different versions of the first meeting and first conversation of Humbert and Lolita suggest about the way we should read the novel? Are there aspects of the novel that already prefigure the kind of reading of the scene, or of the relationship between Humbert and Lolita in general, that we infer from juxtaposing screenplay and novel? Or does reading with that kind of imaginative independence of Humbert prove almost impossible? If so, why has Nabokov made it so difficult?
What advantages are there of the more complex but potentially more misleading presentation of the novel over the less complex and perhaps less treacherous presentation in the film? Does it become a different story on page and screen? Should a story, in order to stay the same story, be transformed as it moves from one medium to the other? Does a story stay the same story when it is transformed in medium or emphasis? What creative potentials remain within the constraints of a given story or even a single scene?
22. Even Homais Nods
Nabokov’s Fallibility; Or, How to Revise Lolita
Nabokov has a reputation for exactness, but as readers of the manuscript index cards of The Original of Laura now know, he could also be error-prone. A single mismatched detail in the internal dating of Lolita has led some good Nabokov critics and other keen readers, accustomed to unreliable narration and postmodern self-undermining, to see much in the late stages of Lolita as hallucinatory. Like most others aware of the discrepancy, I think it a simple mistake, and the various alternative readings that construe it as an intentional clue become more confused than Nabokov’s text. But the discrepancy also offers a revelation.
The New Yorker’s wonderful research department several times saved Mr. Nabokov—who seems to combine a good deal of absentmindedness with his pedantism—from various blunders regarding names, numbers, book titles and the like.1
In Pnin Nabokov glances at one of the most famous mistakes in literature, when night after night Victor tries to induce sleep by sinking into fantasies of himself as a king about to flee, pacing, as he awaits rescue, a strand on the Bohemian Sea. Ben Jonson was the first to mock Shakespeare for having a ship wrecked on the coast of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale; Samuel Johnson assumes Shakespeare is “little careful of geography”; Tristram Shandy turns the point to its own advantage.2
But Coleridge more than once talked of having often dismissed as a fault in Shakespeare what he later saw as a “beauty.” Just as Victor knew what he was doing in choosing this impossible sea coast—and this is probably Nabokov’s particular point—so did Shakespeare in stressing the coast of Bohemia, since it would be hard to find a more landlocked region in Europe.3 Shakespeare rewrote geography in order to emphasize the fantastic nature of his plot—as he did also in choosing The Winter’s Tale for a title and in all the expressions of incredulity at the play’s close—just as, for instance, he chose to violate history for other ends by fusing classical Rome and Renaissance Italy in Cymbeline.
In the twentieth century the professionalization of criticism and the ever-increasing prestige of Shakespeare have led critic after critic to resurrect as virtues in this or that play what had once seemed defects. This has yielded many valuable insights, but it has also led to a working principle that Shakespeare could not make a mistake. This of course, in the schizoid world of modern criticism, where some blithely combine Freud and Marx, is not incompatible with others insisting that Shakespeare always already contradicts himself. But the widespread assumption of Shakespeare’s infallibility has often led to absurd consequences.4
In Nabokov’s case, too, both the professionalization of criticism and the prestige of the author have encouraged critics to adopt as an article of faith that he also soars above error. He does, of course, let pass far fewer mistakes than Shakespeare. Where Shakespeare paid little if any attention to publishing works other than his poems, Nabokov kept meticulous control over his texts, in all the languages he knew. Aware that he was writing for an audience that would see a play only once, Shakespeare could distort the time scale of his stories to combine a sense of
rapid pace and gradual development, since the dual calendar would be noticed only by careful rereaders. But such careful rereaders were precisely Nabokov’s ideal audience.
Besides, Nabokov was of a notoriously precise, even pedantic temperament, hard on anyone else’s mistakes, exigent about particulars, insistent on an exactitude of detail and a delicacy of interconnection that make it natural to expect him to ensure the accuracy of all his work. Nearly always, the expectation is justified. Line 3 of Humbert’s poem “Wanted, wanted, Dolores Haze”—“Age: five thousand three hundred days” (Lolita 257)—seems only to combine the continuation of the “Wanted” poster format, an affectionate approximation, and a rhyme. But after we calculate the gap between Lolita’s birth, January 1, 1935 and July 5, 1949, the day Humbert discovers her missing, and find it to be exactly 5,300 days, we will hesitate to attribute any discrepancy in Nabokov’s work to oversight.
All the more so when we recall how fascinated he was by deception in nature, especially in mimicry, and how much he liked to find in his art equivalents for the sly playfulness he sensed behind things. He even wrote: “In art, as in nature, a glaring disadvantage may turn out to be a subtle protective device” (KQK viii). As if this were not enough, he has said, in discussing the editing of Eugene Onegin: “Even obvious misprints should be treated gingerly; after all, they may be supposed to have been left uncorrected by the author” (EO 1.15–16).
But even Homer nods, and so does Nabokov, and to build sweeping interpretations on details that seem much more explicable as errors is fraught with danger. I have in mind especially the thesis, first proposed in 1976 by Elizabeth Bruss, developed in 1979 by Christina Tekiner, in 1989 by Leona Toker, in 1990 by Alexander Dolinin, in 1995 by Julian Connolly, and soon perhaps by Dieter Zimmer—and independently by others who have spoken and written to me in the wake of the biography and still others on the Nabokov electronic bulletin board—that a hidden inconsistency in Lolita, in Toker’s words, “untells Humbert’s tale.”5 On the last page of the novel, Humbert says that he started work on his manuscript in captivity fifty-six days ago. In John Ray Jr.’s foreword, we discover that Humbert dies on November 16, 1952. Counting back fifty-six days from there, we reach September 22, the day Humbert receives the letter from Lolita. But since he is not in prison on that date, since over the next few days he drives first to Lolita in Coalmont, then to Ivor Quilty in Ramsdale, and finally to Clare Quilty at Pavor Manor, he has no time for these visits and composing the text we are reading. That is Nabokov’s hint, say these attentive readers, that Humbert has merely invented the visit to seventeen-year-old Lolita and the murder of Quilty. In the Russian Lolita, some of these critics add, Nabokov has placed further stress on these dates.
To refute this reading, I will first show that Nabokov could indeed make mistakes, especially in dating, and that second thoughts often merely compounded the confusion. I will then show how little is required to eliminate the revisionist interpretation of Lolita (the emendation of a single typographical character would suffice) and how plainly it contradicts itself and the rest of the text.
First, some examples of Nabokov’s fallibility. One of the reviewers of Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years listed as the “most intriguing fact” in the book my claim (VNAY 613) that Nabokov had committed twenty-one demonstrable errors in his autobiography, most of which I did not have space to list. Let me mention a few here.
Nabokov’s map of the Vyra region in the endpapers of the revised Speak, Memory is thoroughly muddled. What looks like a small tributary coming past the Batovo estate is in fact the Oredezh itself; the river labeled “Oredezh” running past the Rozhdestveno estate is actually the Gryazno, a very short-lived little stream; and when the Oredezh passes the Vyra estate it does not continue west and away from Siverskaya but turns to flow east toward the town. Other errors in Speak, Memory, are equally close to home. Nabokov lists his father as the second son of Dmitri and Maria Nabokov and Sergey as the third when it was the other way around (59). But most of his autobiography’s inaccuracies involve minor details of dating: the birth of his grandfather, his father’s graduation, the sale of Batovo, the duration of the German occupation of Yalta, and the like.
Dates in fact are a common source of error in Nabokov, as he confesses in the foreword to Speak, Memory: “Among the anomalies of a memory, whose possessor and victim should never have tried to become an autobiographer, the worst is the inclination to equate in retrospect my age with that of the century.… Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl” (13). Protesting to Katharine White about the New Yorker’s wanting to change one of the visual details in Speak, Memory’s final chapter, he insisted “I very seldom err when recalling colors,” but only after first making the concession: “As you have probably noticed I often make mistakes when recalling names, titles of books, numbers.”6 Very often Nabokov, like many of us, would date a letter in January to the previous year, but he could do this as late as October.7 He could be quite wildly wrong about the dates of his works, as when he recorded the date of composition of “The Potato Elf” as 19298 rather than the correct April 1924, despite the vast stylistic gap between the stories he wrote in early 1924 and the mastery he had achieved by the time, five years later, that he was writing The Defense.
Errors of memory, especially when they involve dates, may, like casual slips of the tongue or the pen, seem of a different order from apparent inconsistencies in fictional worlds whose details Nabokov entirely controlled himself. But even there, although he was meticulous in the extreme in correcting his work for the smallest imprecisions of phrasing or fact, errors still persisted. Véra Nabokov, never one to denigrate her husband, told me he was very “absent-minded.” When I asked her about resolving editorial problems by consulting the manuscripts, she told me the “manuscripts should not be trusted” as copy texts since “he would often write one word when he meant another” and “might not catch it until the galleys.”9
Pnin is a novel where mistakes matter: Pnin’s garbled English; his endearing errors like the one he discovers when, after laboriously returning a bulky library tome he cannot understand anyone else needing, he finds that the person who has recalled it was himself; Cockerell’s false version of Pnin’s mishap at Cremona; the discrepancies between Pnin’s and the narrator’s accounts of Pnin’s past. In view of these and other meaningful mistakes, Nabokov ought to have tried harder than ever to eliminate unintended errors. But he still does not succeed.
In February 1953 Pnin teaches Elementary Russian to a class that includes Frank Carroll (67). In September 1954 Pnin invites to his party “old Carrol, the Frieze Hall head janitor, with his son Frank, who had been my friend’s only talented student and had written a brilliant doctor’s thesis for him on the relationship between Russian, English and German iambics; but Frank was in the army” (147–48). Somehow in the space of a year Frank Carroll has advanced from Elementary Russian to having completed—some months ago, it seems, given his army service—a Ph.D. that requires a sophisticated command of the language and, presumably, could only have been envisaged by someone with a long-standing interest in Russian verse read in the original. He has also found the time to lose that letter from his surname.
Al Cook (Aleksandr Petrovich Kukolnikov) and his American wife Susan have a summer house, The Pines, to which they invite, “every even-year summer, elderly Russians…; on odd-year summers they would have amerikantsi” (117). But only three pages later Varvara Bolotov is said to have visited The Pines for the first time “in 1951” (120), and finds that its birches and bilberries remind her of her “first fifteen summers” near Lake Onega in northern Russia. Are we to deduce that she is an American falsely posing as a Russian, a Russian whom Al Cook has mistaken for an amerikanka, or simply that Nabokov should have written “1950” or “1952”?
Nabokov was pressed for time, distracted by teaching, and publishing chapters serially over several years when he wrote Pnin. But there were no such exc
uses at the time of Ada.
Van recalls dining at a restaurant with Ada “on New Year’s Eve, 1893” (515), in other words on December 31, 1893. But according to the novel’s very precise calendar, Van and Ada do not meet between February 5, 1893 and October 11, 1905. Now we could deduce from this that Van has either fantasized this dinner with Ada, perhaps in desperate consolation, or that he has deliberately suppressed some of his time with Ada to exaggerate, for effect, the bleakness of their separation. Or we could simply decide that Nabokov made a natural error: he meant the day before New Year’s Day, 1893, and should have written “on New Year’s Eve, 1892.”
Another much more serious error, or rather cluster of errors, was subsequently noticed by Nabokov himself. In part 1, chapter 26, Van describes the codes he and Ada use to correspond in the years between Ardis the First and Ardis the Second. One would expect Van and VN to have been utterly vigilant after a comment like this: “Again, this is a nuisance to explain, and the explanation is fun to read only for the purpose (thwarted, I am afraid) of looking for errors in the examples” (161–62). In fact, the first time the code was used, several pages earlier, Nabokov let slip a misprint (“xlic,” [157]) which he corrected in later editions (to “xliC”).10
But that is not the mistake I mean. Look at this tangle of thorns.
In describing the code, Van states: “The entire period of that separation was to span almost four years from September, 1884 to June 1888, with two brief interludes of intolerable bliss (in August, 1885 and June, 1886) and a couple of chance meetings” (160). The terminal dates are correct, but if the second interlude refers to Van’s meeting feverish Ada at Forest Fork (178), that occurs on July 25, 1886, not in June. “The entire period of that separation” is also interrupted by the Brownhill visit, not a “chance meeting” but taking place in November or December 1884 (167: “he had not seen his Ada for close to three months”). The rest of the novel, then, implies that Van meets Ada between the summers of 1884 and 1888 only at Brownhill, in late 1884, anything but an “interlude of intolerable bliss,” and at Forest Fork, in June 1886; but part 1, chapter 26, implies two trysts, August 1885—never mentioned elsewhere, though Van otherwise assiduously records his meetings with and partings from Ada as milestones and crossroads in his life—July 1886, and two other “chance” meetings. All four meetings seem either partially or totally incompatible with the rest of the novel’s chronology.