by Brian Boyd
But this short chapter, a mere two pages of solid text, is incompatible even with itself. Three paragraphs after the first passage, Van explains that “in the second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered” (161), This could be taken as implying that they changed the code at Forest Fork, in July, or is it June, 1886, but it ignores the August 1885 interlude which surely ought to start “the second period of separation.” The next paragraph makes matters still worse: “Curiously enough, in their third period of separation, from January, 1887, to June 1888 (after a very long-distance call and a very brief meeting)” (162). The January 1887 meeting is not “chance,” and since it marks the third of the three numbered periods in the four-year separation, it is perhaps one of the two “brief interludes of intolerable bliss,” except that they have been dated 1885 and 1886.
No wonder, then, that Nabokov on his own copy of the novel, the one he marked on the recto of the front loose end-paper “Author’s copy” and “Genial’naia kniga—perl’ amerikanskoi literatury” (“A book of genius, the pearl of American literature”), lists on the half-title page thirty-odd corrections to be made, and this note: “p. 161 not worth correcting.” Ingenious readers who had spotted these contradictions without seeing Nabokov’s comment might perhaps have suggested that Van’s aversion to the hints of betrayal in Ada’s coded correspondence makes him recoil from close attention to codes or dates, or that Ada’s Forest Fork fever somehow infects him so that he deliriously confuses this patch of their past. There is no end of possible conjectures, if all we need is an inconsistency as a springboard for fancy. That Nabokov might have become bored with or fatigued by his attempt to outline the codes and simply failed to scrutinize the dates sufficiently would strike some readers as methodologically impermissible, since it moves outside the world of the book, or as just plain heresy.
Nabokov could muddle things further in his attempts to correct real or imagined errors. In part 1, chapter 2, of Ada, for instance, Marina’s “meeting with Baron O.” (12) seems odd, sandwiched as it is between the first and third references to her opposite number in a stage travesty of Eugene Onegin: “a local squire, Baron d’O.” and “Baron d’O., now in black tails and white gloves.” Why, this second time, is he not also “d’O.”? Things become no clearer when on the next page Demon, now occupying the role of Marina’s real-life opposite, meets an art dealer—and soon, he discovers, her lover—called Baron d’ Onsky, who in one of the three references to his name becomes (“simply”?) “d’O.” (13). Why the solitary “Baron O.” on the previous page? Is it to unsettle the bizarre equation between d’O. and d’Onsky? Does it suggest the theme of transfiguration with which Nabokov is preoccupied in his treatment of the Eugene Onegin travesty and even in these semi-interchangeable barons? Or is “O.” a mere oversight for “d’O.”?
In Nabokov’s own master copy of Ada, he began to answer those questions when he changed the third reference to Marina’s opposite, ten lines after the second, from “d’O.” to “O.”—but forgot to turn back to the previous page to alter that “d’O.” to “O.” But at least it was clear now what he wanted, that there should be less overlap than it had seemed between d’O. and d’Onsky. Accordingly, the three references to Marina’s stage partner were changed to “O.” in the German edition, which Nabokov checked through, for eleven days, in company with the German translators, while leaving the abbreviation of “d’Onsky” to “d’O.” untouched.11
At last everything was correct. Or so it seemed. For in revising the French translation of Ada, which he did at his own pace and over a period of six intense months, Nabokov returned all three references to Marina’s opposite to “d’O.”12 And this indeed seems what he originally, and finally, intended. In reading through his own master copy, he had noticed the inconsistency on page 12 and made the second instance conform to the first, not realizing that both now differed from the previous occurrence on page 11. His German translators, presumably, rectified the discrepancy by making the first occurrence conform to the other two, with no objections from Nabokov, who was never at his ease with (and almost never subjected himself to) teamwork. Only in rereading even more slowly and in his own time did Nabokov realize what had happened and restore what he had first meant. This, indeed, now seems the “obvious” reading since it links d’O. not only with d’Onsky but also with “the Don,” Ada’s opposite in Don Juan’s Last Fling, pointedly associated with Marina’s play as another orgasmically interrupted performance.13
One of the many curious features about this sequence of corrections and counter-corrections is that it shows Nabokov quite clearly forgetting what he had once meant. That is even more strikingly noticeable in another change in the Ada master copy where he “corrected” the account of a gambling evening during which Van notices Dick Schuler cheating on and winning a fortune off a pair of French twins. In “the unfortunate twins were passing to each other a fountain pen, thumb-pressing and repressing it in disastrous transit as they calculated their losses” (174), Nabokov changed “fountain pen” to “ball pen,” which seems like a legitimate correction—we “thumb-press” only ball pens, not fountain pens—but destroys an incidental joke: that the twins are so drunk (“happily and hopelessly tight,” 173) that they treat the fountain pen as if it were a ball pen.
Enough has been shown, surely, to prove that Nabokov not infrequently made mistakes, especially with dates, and that even second thoughts did not necessarily improve matters. Let’s now start to move toward Lolita.
In Nabokov’s published screenplay, act 1 opens: “The words LAST DAY OF SCHOOL are gradually scrawled across the blackboard” (LAS 21). Dialogue confirms it as the last day of school for Dolly and her classmates, and consistent time cues move the action forward by degrees to the next day, the day of Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale and his discovering that the McCoo house—in which he had hoped to enjoy Ginny McCoo’s proximity—has just burned down. He finds himself steered to the Haze house and is about to reject it when he sees Lolita. While Charlotte happily pays for the taxi and installs his belongings in the house, Humbert chats up Lolita. He eagerly agrees to help her with her homework, but then she shrugs, “Well, there’s not much today. Gee, school will be over in three weeks” (43). Shortly, Charlotte returns and calls Lolita to the phone: “It’s Kenny. I suspect he wants to escort you to the big dance next month” (45). Two pages later, Nabokov headlines a jump in time: “THREE WEEKS LATER, THE DAY OF THE SCHOOL DANCE” (47). This appears not to be an intertitle, simply an objective indicator for the film’s potential director, whether in studio or study. The dance ensues, with a cameo appearance by Clare Quilty.
Two clearly marked sequences, then, reinforce themselves and remain stubbornly incompatible with each other. In one, Humbert arrives at the Haze home on the last day of school. In the other, he has been at the Haze home for three weeks when Lolita’s school year ends. In the time problem in the novel, there are almost three hundred pages between the incompatible dates, which involve a single indicator in each case. Here in the screenplay one elaborate series of time markers leads almost immediately into another quite incompatible with it.
Surely, some will chorus, a writer as attentive to detail and as wily as Nabokov could never have left such a glaring inconsistency without meaning it. (As far as I know, the discrepancy has never before been remarked on in print, more than twenty years after the screenplay was published. Inconsistencies tend to become “glaring” only when someone points them out.) Is one of the two time sequences unreal, invented perhaps by Humbert? If so, which one? Or is the whole sequence proof that Humbert is Quilty, or that Quilty is only Humbert’s double, since both arrive on Lolita’s (different) last days of school?
It is easy, all too easy, to invent fancy interpretations of this kind. Twentieth-century criticism has become expert, if that is the word, in strategies for retrieving a “higher” consistency from seeming inconsistency—although this often resembles a craft skill, an easily acqui
red habit, rather than real inquiry after explanation. Readers inclined, in this so-called postmodern era, to suppose a story will slyly undermine itself overlook other problems and possibilities. In the Lolita screenplay the inconsistent time sequences cannot be easily explained as Humbert’s invention since the time indicators are objective, supplied in one case by Lolita’s classmates before Humbert arrives in Ramsdale (although of course Humbert might have invented this scene, too, to say nothing of Lolita, and himself—this road can quickly lead to bog and fog) and in the other case by Nabokov himself in a “stage” direction.
But the screenplay’s incompatible time schemes can easily be explained as a mere mistake. Nabokov composed a long first attempt at a Lolita screenplay in the spring and early summer of 1960.14 It had a prologue, Humbert’s killing of Quilty, and three acts, the first of which starts with Lolita on her last day at school, the day Humbert arrives. Nabokov here introduces Quilty to Ramsdale and to Lolita by way of Quilty’s uncle, the dentist. But he then had the idea of reinstating a scene he had envisaged when he first composed the novel, of McCoo engaging Humbert in an irrelevant and comically spooky guided tour of the house where he would have had him as a lodger had lightning not just burnt it down (LAS x). Nabokov therefore wrote an alternative version of act 1 that begins with Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale and the scene at the McCoos’. This version then moves straight to Lawn Street and Humbert’s conversation with sun-bathing Lolita, who runs off to talk on the phone to Kenny, the boy who will take her in three weeks’ time to the end-of-school dance—which in this alternative version Nabokov uses as the means of introducing Quilty in Ramsdale.
Nabokov appears to have allowed Kubrick to decide between the two versions, for he offered both, one paginated normally, the other as “alternative 1,” “alternative 2,” and so on, together with the rest of the typescript. When Kubrick protested that he needed to cut drastically, Nabokov offered a much shorter and more filmable version, in which act 1 drew entirely on the alternative version (LAS x–xi). In late 1970, anxious to publish his screenplay before both Alan Jay Lerner’s Lolita musical and the deadline for his multibook McGraw-Hill contract, Nabokov looked back over it and found that it included three versions of act 1, the original, the alternative, and the abbreviated (see VNAY 580). He decided he needed to introduce Lolita in Ramsdale before Humbert’s arrival so returned to the original opening of act 1 but eliminated her clumsy encounter in the dentist’s chair with Quilty and opted instead for Humbert at the McCoos’, on the piazza with Lolita, and at the school dance with Quilty.
Nabokov conflated, for sound enough reasons, what seemed the best bits of each version, but he did so perfunctorily. He left very spare instructions for his secretary, Jaqueline Callier, to amalgamate the blocks as she retyped the manuscript. That he was anything but in command of dates in his own life, let alone in five versions of Humbert’s (the novel and the ancestral, alternative, abbreviated, and amalgamated screenplays), is almost comically indicated in his record at the top of his instructions: “Added from Brown to Blue Oct 1930 Screenplay.” The blue folder contained the shortened and revised version of the screenplay, which he had submitted to Kubrick in September, now remembered as “October,” 1960, here misrecorded as “1930.” Perhaps the “1930” date proves that everything subsequent, including the novel Lolita and Nabokov’s meeting with Kubrick, was his invention? Or could we accept the simple proposition that he made a mistake here, as in the screenplay itself and, perhaps, in a much smaller way, in the novel?
Let us turn now to Lolita itself.
The argument that the final scenes of Humbert’s story—his meeting with the married Lolita and his murder of Quilty—are his invention or fantasy depends on a single piece of evidence: that Humbert says on the last page of his book “When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, then in this well-heated, albeit tombal seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul” (310). According to John Ray Jr.’s foreword, Humbert “died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start” (5). Flipping back fifty-six days, we arrive at September 22, the day Lolita’s letter reached Humbert. Since the visit to Lolita, the discovery of the name of her abductor, and the murder of Quilty all take place over the next three days, when Humbert says he has been writing in a psychopathic ward, they are therefore, according to the revisionists, fabrications or delusions of Humbert Humbert.
In view of Nabokov’s fallibility, it seems much sounder, let alone much more economical, to call into question a single numeral than to doubt the detailed reality of a whole series of major scenes. It seems especially peculiar to suppose that virtually everything in the last eighth of the novel is fabricated, except for the first nine words of the sentence quoted above: “When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita.” Why, if even the trial mentioned in this sentence is Humbert’s fiction (as it usually is for the revisionists),15 if the psychopathic ward too is a fraud (as it is for Dolinin and sometimes for others), is the “fifty-six” swimming in this sea of falsity to be fished out as incontestable fact?
That Nabokov could err in dating his own life and the lives of his characters has already been amply demonstrated. But let us be clear that—as the revisionists know—Lolita itself is no zone of immunity. To take the life first: in his November 1956 “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Nabokov wrote that he had not “reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the winter of 1954.” He altered this to “in the spring of 1955” for the Annotated Lolita (318, 439), although in fact he received the first proofs only well into the summer of 1955 (July 12: VNAY 269). Only sixteen months after the event, in other words, he had been inaccurate by about eight months.
Within Lolita’s fictional world, he also made at least one incontrovertible error that immediately casts doubt on the value of the “fifty-six days.” The morning Humbert comes down to check the mail is “early in September 1952” (266, 426), according to the 1955 and 1958 editions. Yet three pages later we find, “The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22)” (269)—“this” being the day he receives the letter, hardly “early” in the month. Somebody, perhaps Nabokov himself, muted the mistake in the French translation, where the text has “vers la mi-Septembre.”16 In 1965 Nabokov altered the Russian translation by removing the “September 22” from the next chapter and bringing it forward to replace the vaguer initial reference: “for that particular morning, early in September 1952,” became “ibo v to utro, 22-go sentiabria 1952-go goda” (“for that morning, September 22 1952”).17 Several years later Nabokov supplied to Alfred Appel Jr., for the Annotated Lolita, the correction to “late in September 1952” (266).
The undoubted mistake here, which persisted in Nabokov’s manuscript, typescript, and through readings of at least two sets of proofs (Olympia’s and Putnam’s, though he also read the Crest edition, and presumably the Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Corgi editions), shows how little credence can be given to the unsupported testimony of “fifty-six days.” Here a discrepancy of two weeks or so occurs within a space of three pages and was not picked up by Nabokov for over ten years. The “fifty-six days” as evidence depends on an error of only three days over a gap of over three hundred pages.
Not only on that, some might say. There is one other relevant change in the Russian—where, as Gennady Barabtarlo shows, dates have several times been supplied where there were none in the original.18 In the English edition, Humbert, after finding it impossible to trace Lolita’s abductor, begins a new chapter: “This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called ‘Dolorès Disparue,’ there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed” (255). In the Russian the last thirteen words become “podrobnoe opisanie poslednikh trekh pustikh let, ot nachala iiulia 19
49 do serediny noiabria 1952, ne imelo by smysla [a detailed description of the last three empty years, from the beginning of July 1949 to the middle of November 1952, would make no sense]” (234). Alexander Dolinin cites this in support of his theory, as proof that there was nothing but blankness—no meeting with Lolita, no encounter with Quilty—in Humbert’s life from Lolita’s disappearance until this point near the end of his writing his book. Humbert is, “therefore, at home, at his writing desk but not in a cell awaiting trial, as he has tried to convince his gullible readers.”19 But if this were a major piece of evidence in the reading that Nabokov wanted to imprint on his book, why did he then not transfer it back into the Annotated Lolita when he incorporated corrections there that he saw as necessary in the Russian?
If the probability of a mistake in Nabokov’s numerals seems high from the first, the improbability of the revisionist view seems overwhelming. Even a reader unaware of Nabokov’s capacity for error will see an immediate objection to the revisionist theory: what of John Ray Jr.’s foreword? The November 16 date for Humbert’s death, on which the whole case rests, comes from Ray, but Ray also confirms just what the case tries to deny—what Dolinin denies outright—that Humbert was in prison awaiting trial when he finished his manuscript and promptly died. Tekiner suggests that—since, presumably, Ray does not explicitly mention that Humbert’s trial is for murder—the trial could be for his treatment of Lolita. But Ray declares that “references to ‘H.H”s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952” (6). There is nothing here or anywhere else in the foreword to imply that the inquisitive will find that the newspaper accounts utterly contradict Humbert’s.20