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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Fifty years after its publication, and 20 after my first reading, Nabokov's masterpiece is still dangerous -- but not for the reasons you might think.
Dec 22, 2005 | Many of the most important relationships in my life have revolved around "Lolita." In high school in Birmingham, Ala., being a lover of "Lolita" and other Vladimir Nabokov novels, but especially "Lolita," was exciting, like being part of some secret society. A gay friend of mine in 12th grade said that being a Nabokov reader in high school was kind of like being gay: You never openly admitted it but always looked for telltale signs of those who were of similar persuasion, often by making furtive eye contact with someone you saw reading the novel in study hall. Reading Nabokov was one of the only ways to make friends with gays or would-be poets or just about anyone strange or different or interesting. I knew of only one other writer who inspired such an odd cult among high schoolers, Ayn Rand, who, like Nabokov, was a Russian émigré with an intense hatred of communism. Aside from that, the two could not have been more different. Rand's novels were the kind of transparent philosophical tracts that Nabokov loathed as much as he loathed Marxism. The similarities between the Nabokov and Rand cults was creepy; even more creepy was that I almost never came across anyone who read both of them.
For that matter, I can scarcely recall anyone in the cult of Nabokov who joined the cult of any other writer. Whatever others one read and enjoyed, they took a back seat to Nabokov, who demanded nearly total devotion. In addition to helping you meet interesting people, working your way through Nabokov's oeuvre also provided you with a way of spending quality time with yourself. When I was old enough to drive, I would sneak away on Sunday mornings on the pretext of going to church and find some lonely place -- a park in good weather, a fountain in a deserted mall when it was cold or rainy -- to sit and read "Lolita," "Pale Fire," "Pnin" and whatever other Nabokovian treasures I had been able to lay my hands on, which in Birmingham was no simple task. You couldn't check "Lolita" out of a library unless you were over 18 -- and what looks you got from middle-aged librarians with horn-rimmed glasses and their hair in buns when you tried! The handful of local bookstores didn't carry many Nabokov titles. Just about the only way to cope was to hope that the secondhand-book store had done a fast turnaround in the two weeks since you had previously been there.
Over the years, I cultivated friendships with nothing more than an exchange of stories about where and how we stumbled on the hard-to-find Time-Life edition of "Bend Sinister" or the paperback of "King, Queen, Knave" with its silly, lurid, '40s noirish cover, which made it look like something by James M. Cain. It was almost an initiation to see how much of the first chapter of "Lolita" one could memorize. I could recite the first two paragraphs:
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Delores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."
She chewed bubblegum and said things that sounded like a weird mixture of '50s movie teen and a schoolgirl imitating Grace Kelly: "I must go now, kiddo." She was, in the words of the monster who loved her, Humbert Humbert, a mixture "of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures; from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels." She was, I liked to think, all my favorite wrong girlfriends rolled into one.
She also enticed me into a lifetime of reading. I knew that on some level I couldn't articulate then, and am scarcely capable of doing now, this was more than a story about a lecherous old guy and a preteen girl, though, as if Nabokov were standing over my shoulder, I was afraid to apply terms we were taught in English like symbol and metaphor, which he disdained. I congratulated myself for perceiving immediately that Lolita was some sort of turn on "Daisy Miller" (which we had studied in school prior to my first reading "Lolita") and the usual Henry Jamesian theme of old Europe corrupting young America. I was thrilled that I was smart enough to spot references to Poe and Prosper Merimee's "Carmen" and Shakespeare and Joyce (whom I had just read). I was even more delighted to find that others had combed the book as I had and uncovered allusions to, among others, the Marquis de Sade and Verlaine and Rimbaud -- which sent me scrambling to the library to find out what they were all about. I've never felt so clever in my life as when I figured out that the doctor, John Ray Jr., who wrote the pompous foreword in defense of "Lolita," was actually Nabokov, anticipating not only the book's critics but its defenders as well. Ray on Humbert: "He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!"
With the new Vintage 50th anniversary edition, I'm discovering "Lolita" all over again, and, much to my surprise and dismay, rather agreeing with Humbert's doctor. It also has me both enthralled and a bit queasy that, unlike other more sexually explicit American novels that were once considered scandalous, "Lolita's" power to shock is undiminished. (The audio version, beautifully rendered by Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert in Adrian Lyne's ridiculously solemn 1997 film version, proudly announces the text to be "unabridged, uncensored.") Well, perhaps shock is not the right word. As a society we have become, on the whole, more tolerant of just about every other manifestation of sexual desire, but the notion of a middle-aged man and a very young girl is something we are no closer to accepting now than we were half a century ago.
