The first time I read Lolita I thought
it was one of the funniest books I'd ever come on. (This was the abbreviated
version published in the Anchor Review last year.) The second time I read it,
uncut, I thought it was one of the saddest. I mention this personal reaction
only because Lolita is one of those occasional books which arrive swishing
behind them a long tail of opinion and reputation which can knock the unwary reader
off his feet. Is it shocking, is it pornographic, is it immoral? Is its reading
to be undertaken not as a simple experience but as a conscious action which
will place one on this, or that, side of a critical dividing line? What does
the Watch and Ward Society say of it? What does Sartre, Graham Greene or
Partisan Review?
This is hard on any book. 'Lolita'
stands up to it wonderfully well, though even its author has felt it necessary
to contribute an epilogue on his intentions. This, by the way, seems to me
quite as misleading as the purposely absurd (and very funny) prologue by 'John
Ray Jr., Ph. D.,' who is a beautifully constructed caricature of American
Academic Bumbledom. But in providing a series of trompe-l'oeil frames
for the action of his book, Vladimir Nabokov has undoubtedly been acting with
intent: they are screens as well as frames. He is not writing for the ardent
and simple-minded civil-libertarian any more than he is writing for the private
libertine; he is writing for readers, and those who can read him simply will be
well rewarded.
He is fond of frames and their
effects. A final one is provided within the book itself by the personality of
the narrator Humbert Humbert ('an assumed name'). Humbert is a close-to-40
European, a spoiled poet turned dilettante critic, the possessor of a small but
adequate private income and an enormous and agonizing private problem: he is
aroused to erotic desire only by girls on the edge of puberty, 9-to-14-
year-old 'nymphets.' Julliet, Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura all fell
within this age range, but to poor panting Humbert Humbert, the twentieth
century denies the only female things he really desires.
Then, as in a fairy tale, his wish
comes true. Lolita is its fulfillment. She is the quintessence of the nymphet,
discovered by total accident in an Eastern American small town. To get her,
Humbert puts himself through a pattern of erotic choreography that would shame
a bower-bird. He is grotesque and horrible and unbearably funny, and he knows
it. He will settle for anything, and does. The 'anything' involves marrying
Lolita's widowed mother, Charlotte, with all the lies and swallowing of
distaste that this implies. Charlotte promptly arranges to send the child away
so that the two 'lovers' can be alone together, and Humbert begins to consider
the distasteful lies necessitated by murder.
Fate, however, intervenes. (McFate,
Humbert calls him, envisioning him as an old, lavish and absent- minded friend
addicted to making ambiguous gifts, a sort of deified Bernard Goldfine).
Charlotte is killed in an accident. Dream come true! With his little
stepdaughter (he drops the 'step' to strangers), Humbert sets out on an odyssey
of lechery that approaches the flights and 'fugues' of schizophrenia.
It turns into a nightmare. Through two
years and two lengthy circuits of the American scene, Humbert spirals down the
levels of his inferno. Possessed, insatiable, he can never stop wanting Lolita
because he never really has her, he has only her body. In the end, his
punishment matches his crime. Lolita runs off with a monster; Humbert attempts
to track them (giving a hilarious impersonation of a Thurber bloodhound as he
does), bounces into a sanitarium, bounces out and lives in despair, until
Dolly, who used to be Lolita, finds him. She is now an entirely
different person, a triumph for the vital force that has managed to make a life
out of the rubble that Humbert's passion created, and the monster's mindless
activity merely confirmed. For a moment Humbert stands revealed to himself as
her destroyer. But this confrontation does him no good. He sheers off into
action again and rushes away to find and murder the monster in a long
tragi-farcical shambles that somehow combines the chase scene from 'Charley's
Aunt' with the d'nouement of 'Titus Andronicus.'
In his epilogue, Mr. Nabokov informs
us that 'Lolita' has no moral. I can only say that Humbert's fate seems to me
classically tragic, a most perfectly realized expression of the moral truth
that Shakespeare summed up in the sonnet that begins, 'The expense of spirit in
a waste of shame/ Is lust in action': right down to the detailed working out of
Shakespeare's adjectives, 'perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame.' Humbert
is the hero with the tragic flaw. Humbert is every man who is driven by desire,
wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a
human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh 3/4 which is the
eternal and universal nature of passion.
The author, that is, is writing about
all lust. He has afflicted poor Humbert with a special and taboo variety for a
couple of contradictory reasons. In the first place, its illicit nature will
both shock the reader into paying attention and prevent sentimentally false sympathy
from distorting his judgment. Contrariwise, I believe, Mr. Nabokov is slyly
exploiting the American emphasis on the attraction of youth and the importance
devoted to the 'teen-ager' in order to promote an unconscious identification
with Humbert's agonies. Both techniques are entirely valid. But neither, I
hope, will obscure the purpose of the device: namely, to underline the
essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion,
all greed'of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied
without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world.
Humbert is all of us.
So much for the moral of this book,
which is not supposed to have one. Technically it is brilliant, Peter-De-Vries
humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail
of social behavior. If there is one fault to find, it is that in making his
hero his narrator, Mr. Nabokov has given him a task that is almost too big for
a fictional character. Humbert tends to run over into a figure of allegory, of
Everyman. When this happens it unbalances the book, for every other character
belongs in a novel and is real as real can be. Humbert alone runs over at the
edges, as if in painting him Mr. Nabokov had just a little too much color on
his brush; which color is, I suppose, the moral that poor Humbert is carrying
for his creator.
Never mind. This is still one of the
funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year. As for
its pornographic content, I can think of few volumes more likely to quench the
flames of lust than this exact and immediate description of its consequences.
Sunday,
August 17, 1958
[1] Mrs. Janeway is both a critic of
fiction and, in such books as 'The Walsh Girls' and 'Leaving Home,' a writer of
it.
