by Brian Boyd
In his long discussion of the implications of the “fifty-six days,” Dolinin, of course, refers to the “November 16” date from which the countback starts, but curiously he never mentions the person who supplies that date and never addresses Ray’s assumption that Humbert’s story coincides with the known facts of the case, the details of the murder listed even in the newspapers. But to ignore evidence does not make it go away.
Connolly at least takes note of the conflicting evidence, even if only to will it into oblivion when he suggests that Humbert may have invented Ray’s foreword.21 But if that is the case, then of course Humbert does not die on November 16, 1952, and there is no firm date from which to count back fifty-six days, and the discrepancy on which the whole case rests becomes nonexistent or meaningless.
Nabokov intended to indicate that Humbert died just after putting the last words to his manuscript. That is why he supplied the number of days Lolita took Humbert to compose, why he has Dr. Ray supply the date of Humbert’s death, and why he explains in his interview with Alfred Appel Jr. that in Humbert’s final paragraph he meant “to convey a constriction of the narrator’s sick heart, a warning spasm causing him to abridge names and hasten to conclude his tale before it was too late” (437). If there is a discrepancy between the number of days Lolita took Humbert to write and the number of days until Humbert’s death, that seems an error all too easy to make. Either Nabokov simply used the wrong starting point, counting from September 22 (Humbert’s receipt of the letter), the one concrete date given in the novel’s concluding sequence of events, rather than from September 25 (the murder), which has to be inferred from the text, or he counted correctly but he—or the typesetter—put “November 16” rather than the intended “November 19” for Humbert’s death, making no more than the very common slip of 6 for 9. If the text now read “November 19,” the argument for Humbert’s having invented the last fifty pages of Lolita would immediately collapse. Surely it is too much to base a major reinterpretation of a novel on a single typographic character?
Nabokov always aims for exactitude. He does not allow us simply to lean on evidence, as the revisionists have to do; he makes it click into place. He has made a mistake in the dating, but what he has tried to do has his customary precision and point. Humbert admits that he has “wanted,” as he says in his final paragraph, just as he feels his heart twitch, “to exist at least a couple of months longer” (311) than Quilty. In fact, since he will have only a few more hours or even minutes, he will have outlasted Quilty by fifty-six days, or eight weeks: exactly two lunar months, but still just short of two strict calendar months. Playful Aubrey McFate, as it were, pretends to grant Humbert the two months he had asked for, then cuts him short, denying even that small request. That is the very exact, very Nabokovian irony of these final dates, except that somewhat—but not completely—uncharacteristically, and all too humanly, he has made a slight error.
I would not have written this article if only one critic had proposed the revisionist hypothesis. I would have stopped here if two or three had propelled me into print. But with six already advancing the argument, another thinking about doing so, and others inclined to entertain it, I will continue.
Dr. Ray’s foreword records that Mrs. Richard Schiller dies in childbirth in Gray Star, “a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (6). How has she reached there, if Humbert does not respond to her letter that says, “I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska” (268)? Why does Nabokov in the afterword think of Gray Star as “the capital town of the book” (318) if Lolita does not die there in childbirth? (Gray Star, presumably, is Juneau, Alaska’s capital, in allusion to the old cartographic convention of stars for capital cities but also a play on Juno, the goddess of marriage.) If Ray’s foreword is accepted—and to repeat, if it is not, “November 16” disappears as evidence and takes with it the whole revisionist argument—it explicitly or implicitly confirms Lolita’s letter, Humbert’s visit to her, Quilty’s murder, and Humbert’s composing the manuscript in prison while awaiting trial for the killing, all the things the revisionists try to discredit.
So too does Lolita: A Screenplay.
While the screenplay reinvents minor details of the novel, its main alterations seem designed precisely to convey what Nabokov regarded as crucial to the novel but likely to be lost without considerable adaptation.22 First, and most important, Quilty’s shadowy presence throughout the novel, which readers can discover only after Humbert has himself dropped the name, is signaled in the screenplay by opening with a flash forward to the murder scene and by then making him more prominent, once the narrative returns to the beginning, from the time of Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale (at the school dance, where Quilty is presented as author of The Nymphet; at the Enchanted Hunters, where he is named as the drunken guest; at Beardsley School, where he is again named as author of The Enchanted Hunters). Second, Nabokov stresses the Edgar Allan Poe allusions, at the cost of some strain, through Humbert’s scholarly work and sometimes even Lolita’s schooling. Third, as frame to and external commentator on Humbert’s confession, John Ray Jr. becomes the sometimes comically obtrusive narrator of the whole film.
Humbert cannot narrate the film, as he does the book, for his utter ignorance of the identity of Lolita’s abductor until the end is still crucial to the story. In the novel, he could introduce Quilty’s presence and yet keep his identity hidden until the right moment, thereby having the satisfaction of keeping the reader in the darkness he had himself found so unlaughable. In the film, he could not be the narrator and allow Quilty to be seen on screen without repeatedly disclosing his present awareness of Quilty’s role. By removing Humbert from the narration of the film and flashing forward right at the beginning to the murder, Nabokov alerts us to the identity of Humbert’s foe from the start and therefore makes us vividly aware, whenever we later catch sight of Quilty, of Humbert’s failure to recognize his rival until the very end.
The screenplay opens with Lolita telling Humbert where Quilty lives—showing him, in fact, a magazine photograph of Pavor Manor, which then comes to life as Humbert arrives and promptly, wordlessly, kills Quilty. Immediately afterward, the camera cuts to:
Dr. John Ray, a psychiatrist, perusing a manuscript on his desk. He swings around toward us in his swivel chair.
Dr. Ray: I’m Dr. John Ray. Pleased to meet you. This here is a bundle of notes, a rough autobiography, poorly typed, which Mr. Humbert Humbert wrote after his arrest, in prison, where he was held without bail on a charge of murder, and in the psychopathic ward for observation. Without this document his crime would have remained unexplained.
(LAS 2–3)
After Ray explains that Humbert’s memoir is “mainly an account of his infatuation with a certain type of very young girl,” the camera cuts to Humbert’s Cell in The Tombs
He is writing at a table. Conspicuous among the reference books at his elbow are some tattered travel guides and maps. Presently his voice surfaces as he rereads the first sentences of his story.
Humbert’s voice: I was born in Paris forty dark years ago…
(3–4)
Obviously, there are differences, but they seem designed primarily to make the major effects of the novel possible on the screen. Dr. Ray exists objectively before our eyes, and he describes Humbert’s composing the manuscript in prison after committing murder (he does not explicitly specify Quilty as murder victim: does this leave a loophole for the desperate revisionist?). By indicating Humbert’s reference books, Nabokov establishes his character’s effort at reliability in retelling his past. And he lets us see the murder before Humbert sets down his story, even lets us see Quilty asleep in Pavor Manor before Humbert first appears on screen, before Humbert reaches the manor. The murder, unequivocally, is not a product of Humbert’s narration.
The scene of Humbert’s reading Lolita’s letter, of which the revisionists make a great deal, is replaced by a par
allel scene in the screenplay. Understandably, Nabokov has excised Rita from the screenplay as an unnecessary complication and instead shows Humbert, after he loses Lolita and all trace of her abductor’s trail, teaching once again at Beardsley College. There he meets Mona Dahl, who quizzes him—years have passed—about Lolita. As Nabokov notes after this scene in an explanatory aside unimpeachably immune from revisionist skepticism: “It should now have been established that Mona has had a letter from Lolita, apparently asking her to find out if it is safe for her, Lolita, to write to Humbert” (198). Humbert picks up his mail at the university post office and heads straight to an examination he is to invigilate. He opens the letter, hears, just as in the novel “a small, matter-of-fact, agonizingly familiar, voice” (199)—and after reading through Lolita’s letter, he dashes, dazed, from the exam room.
In the novel, Humbert prepares for his unpreparedness for Lolita’s letter with the great passage about endowing “our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear” (267). Obviously, something new is needed for the screenplay both to prepare us for the surprise and to show Humbert’s unpreparedness: hence the device of introducing Mona’s questions, whose import we can see but Humbert cannot, and Humbert’s blandly opening the letter (“from a Mrs. Richard Schiller—some graduate student, I presume” [198], he had moaned in the mailroom) in the midst of the examination. And just as the novel stresses the shocked suddenness of Humbert’s response—he leaves without even waking Rita from her solid morning sleep—so does the screenplay, when Humbert lurches away from his post as invigilator. For all the changes in the treatment of Lolita’s letter, Nabokov has sought cinematic ways of stressing its credibility and of eliciting the same key responses in us and in Humbert.
Humbert heads for Coalmont, where the screenplay closely follows the novel. As soon as he finds Quilty’s name from Lolita, ascertains that she will never return to him, and heads off to find Pavor Manor, the screenplay’s visual action ends, as Dr. Ray’s voiceover explains that
Poor Lolita died in childbed a few weeks later, giving birth to a stillborn girl, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remote Northwest. She never learned that Humbert finally tracked down Clare Quilty and killed him. Nor did Humbert know of Lolita’s death when shortly before his own dissolution he wrote in prison these last words of his tragic life’s story:
Humbert’s voice (clear and firm):… While the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blest matter as I am. I can still talk to you and make you live in the minds of later generations. I’m 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
(212–13)
The screenplay ends with the final two sentences of the novel intact. Once again, it strives for the very effects that the novel achieves. The reader of the novel, anxious to know what exactly did happen to Lolita and vaguely remembering the fates of some characters given in Dr. Ray’s foreword, can turn back there and appreciate the poignant ironies: Lolita’s death, despite Humbert’s wishes for her longevity; Humbert’s sudden death, without ever learning of hers. The screenplay offers the connections that the novel invites; Nabokov planned nothing to undermine them, and a single slip in counting should not be allowed to destroy the world he created.
Revisionists could at this point try to shore up their sagging case by arguing that Nabokov would have been reluctant to undermine the status of the story in a Hollywood screenplay at the beginning of the 1960s. But he refused to undertake the screenplay at all while he could see no way to render the novel. Presumably when he did undertake it he thought he had found a means of conveying what mattered in the novel—and if the meeting with Lolita and the encounter with Quilty had never really happened in the novel, that would certainly matter.
Nor was Nabokov shy about undermining the status of dramatized events: the last act of Death (1923) may be, and almost all of The Waltz Invention (1938) certainly is, the delusion of the hero. He was hardly less bold in his sixties than he had been in his early twenties. The Lolita screenplay abounds in disruptive expressionist and self-conscious effects, like Humbert’s mother flying up to heaven holding a parasol after her death by lightning, or Dr. Ray as narrator offering urgent advice to a driver in a scene he knows occurred more than a decade before (“Look out! Close shave. When you analyze these jaywalkers you find they hesitate between the womb and the tomb” [13]). Had Nabokov wanted to suggest the final scenes of the novel were Humbert’s invention, he could have done so in the screenplay. There is nothing to suggest the idea ever occurred to him.
What surprises me most about the revisionists, the three most recent of whom are Nabokov scholars I greatly respect, is that they have not only so much against their case but so little going for it.
If their case were true, Humbert would have either invented or fantasized the visit to Lolita and the murder of Quilty. Surely invention is ruled out. Humbert, who is unrelentingly vain, would hardly choose to invent a Lolita who makes it perfectly plain he doesn’t feature in her experience of love and never has and who says that the only person she has ever really loved is the rival whom Humbert detests and whom she herself has come to think rather squalid. Nor would Humbert be likely to fabricate the murder of his rival in such a fashion that he is made to look a fool in the very act of executing the revenge he has so longed for, as Quilty coolly mocks him (“Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I am concerned” [Lolita 302]) and even orchestrates the whole show (“the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty” [307]) that Humbert so craves to direct himself.
Above all, it seems impossible to imagine a Humbert who could construct a scene as rich in independent life as the reunion with Lolita at Coalmont. He has no gift of narrative invention, apart from his penchant for vague self-indulgent fantasy—fondling Ginny McCoo, reliving his Mediterranean idyll with Annabel beside Hourglass Lake with Lolita, murdering Charlotte as she swims, siring a litter of Lolitas, savoring the bliss of sweet revenge on Lolita’s abductor. Indeed, it is essential to Humbert’s nature that in these brief projections on the screen of his indulgence he fails to take into account the live reality of others. Not that he is so obtuse as to be, like Hermann in Despair, incapable of perceiving it even after the fact—after Charlotte’s discovery of the diary, after he has at last possessed Lolita, after he sees her burst into tears at the tenderness between Avis Chapman and her father. I cannot see what evidence the novel has offered that Humbert can invent a moment like this:
“And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada”—I reshouted—“I mean Alaska, of course.”
He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he cut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy.”
(276–77)
Or this:
“What things?”
“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude…”
“What things exactly?
“Oh, things… Oh, I—really I”—she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
(278–79)
Imagine that gesture, act it out. Nabokov, after decades of writing fiction and of deliberately studying gesture, can invent this, but Humbert surely cannot. Nor is there anything in these scenes that makes them smack, as Luzhin’s or Hermann’s or Kinbote’s so plainly do, of a madman’s visions.
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Apart from the discrepancy in dating, the revisionists have no concrete evidence. They point to the tinge of fantasy surrounding the scenes that follow Humbert’s reading the letter, especially the murder scene, and argue that this proves them his invention. In the murder scene, of course, Humbert has explicitly drunk too much and is even more agitated than usual. It would be astonishing if reality were not skewed a little. But the revisionists simply ignore the element of fantasy that surrounds almost every scene in Lolita, from as far back as Humbert’s first memory, his mother’s death (“picnic, lightning” [12]), through his first glimpse of Lolita (“And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, 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 indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused” [41]), to the morning Humbert finds Lolita gone and drives drunkenly to the hospital through the “cute little town” of Elphinstone, with “its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist” (248). If a jittery jostling of reality sufficed to prove that Humbert invented a scene from scratch, we would have to conclude he had invented even his own childhood and Lolita’s whole existence.
It further discredits the revisionists that they cannot agree on what the discrepant dates are supposed to show Humbert has invented: all that follows the letter but not the letter itself nor Ray’s foreword? the letter, too? the foreword, too? Experienced Nabokovians should know that Nabokov does not allow dual or multiple solutions: his solutions, like those of his chess problems, are exact (and, of course, not self-contradictory, like an “invented” foreword).