Nabokov in America (25 page)

The
soot-black lashes
²³
of her pale-gray vacant eyes … five asymmetrical freckles … I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked candy… . Oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.

The “lady writer” would be able to examine her clinically, therefore more exhaustively, but it is his corrupt, desirous gaze that brings her alive:

She wore a
plaid shirt
²⁴
, blue jeans and sneakers… . After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet … and chuck them at a can.
Ping
. You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—this is agony—a second time.
Ping
. Marvelous skin … tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food.

All at once I
knew I could kiss
²⁵
her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches… . A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange.

Later in the novel—after Humbert has been ravaging Lolita at the rate of three acts of intercourse per day—he continues to discover her.
The rotting monsters of his worse nature do not blind him; indeed, his perceptions grow more complex, more tender:

She wore her
first cloth coat
²⁶
with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back—and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps… . Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip.

The pulsing, frightening energy of the novel comes from looking ever deeper at a forbidden thing. For him the captive nymphet is inexhaustible as a subject; then, mysteriously, Lolita the girl is.

That this will be a sex novel announces itself quickly. John Ray Jr., Ph.D., author of the foreword, identifies himself as an authority on “
perversions
²⁷
,” promising that “platitudinous evasions” will not obscure what’s to come. There will be scenes of an “
 ‘aphrodisiac’ 
²⁸
” nature, so prepare yourself. Ray’s foreword, read by most critics as a quick bath in Nabokovian irony, the smug editor daring to think he understands the work he introduces, stands in a proud tradition, that of noted American authors, Whitman and Poe for instance, who reviewed themselves under assumed names. Writing as Ray, Nabokov asserts the supreme value of his work: it is “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis,” he asserts, and though his tongue is in his cheek, this is an argument that his allies (his wife and son, prominently) would advance for the next fifty years:

A
great work of art
²⁹
is of course always original, and … should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity… . A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not
absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. 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!

Another shameless American self-promoter—American by naturalization—attending these early pages is Frank Harris, author of the most notorious sex memoir published during Nabokov’s lifetime. Humbert, like the Harris of
My Life and Loves
(1922), loses his mother at age three; sexual feelings come soon after (age five for Harris; for Humbert, a bit later, when he observes “
some interesting
³⁰
reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous
La Beauté Humaine
”).

Nabokov parodies Harris’s and other sex memoirs, but meanwhile he
indites one
³¹
. Sex is not a theme threaded through the story of a life but itself the story, with other elements to clothe it. Unlike Harris, who fancied himself a crusader for a subterranean tradition in English writing, “
the one of perfect liberty
³²
, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a … liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech,” Nabokov cannot or will not overcome his distaste for profanity. Euphemisms marble this text as they did
The Enchanter
, but here they fail to disguise—often, they perversely underscore—a new directness about physicality, a lurid explicitness:

Next moment
³³
, in a sham effort to retrieve [a magazine they were both looking at], she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.

They are alone in the house together; Mrs. Haze has gone to church. Humbert, wearing a silk dressing gown, “by this time … was in a
state of excitement
³⁴
bordering on insanity,” and he “managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, [his] masked lust to her guileless limbs.”

Thoughts along these lines were enough to plunge
The Enchanter
’s antihero into a morbid, eventually fatal seizure of guilt. Humbert goes the whole hog. He will not rape the child, but he
will
have his satisfaction:

Talking fast
³⁵
, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter—and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction … between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion.

Lolita seems oblivious; she chews on an “Eden-red apple.” In the frottage piece that follows, the slowing or stretching out of time associated with Humbert’s contemplation of a nymphet becomes an entrancement, an instance of sex magic: “I entered a
plane of being
³⁶
where nothing mattered,” he says, “save the infusion of joy brewed within my body.” He loses himself

in the pungent
³⁷
but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay… . What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow.

Soon he begins thinking of seraglios and harem girls. He is describing incidentally a state of
kavla
, to use the Greek term prevalent in the Levant, meaning a state of impending orgasm and the timeless time of its inevitability:

I was a radiant
³⁸
and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss … I kept repeating chance words … as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed.

Lolita, too, seems on edge. Humbert touches a bruise on her thigh, and

“Oh,
it’s nothing
³⁹
at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost
reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.

Though veiled by his “fancy prose style,” this is a transgressive sex act described to the very end. It does not have precedent in Nabokov’s oeuvre. It asserts that a child enjoys herself on her abuser’s lap; it shows that child in attitudes associated with a grown woman having an orgasm (shrill note, wiggling, head thrown back, teeth biting lip). Nabokov makes happen what formerly he did not or could not. The European gentleman of
The Enchanter
has metamorphosed into a new, rampant type of monster in a common American house, sated, sweaty, “immersed in
a euphoria
⁴⁰
of release,” and not at all inclined to commit suicide for shame.

The
composition
⁴¹
of
LOLITA
took place over five years. Nabokov’s duties at Cornell were lighter than they had been at Wellesley, at least at the start; with a better salary, with
Speak, Memory
appearing serially in the
New Yorker
and attracting readers, with Dmitri doing well at a boarding school his parents liked, Nabokov was set up to undertake a long job of new work.

The writing was arduous. “
Once or twice
⁴²
I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft,” he says in his afterword; his biographers agree that there were
real attempts
⁴³
to destroy the book: one in the fall of ’48, as he was starting at Cornell, and another two years later. Véra is the heroine of the burnings. She fished four-by-six cards or pages from a galvanized can in which her husband had started a fire and then she stomped on them, telling him, “We
are keeping
⁴⁴
this,” which judgment he accepted.

Burning, rather than throwing away, seemed called for because the book’s material was dangerous, explosive. Nabokov destroyed some of his research notes, and today there exists no holograph manuscript of
Lolita
because he burned the
cards he composed on
⁴⁵
when he made a fair copy. The attempts to destroy the work in progress seem contrived, though—dramatic gestures. Véra came to the rescue because she was nearby; he did not start fires when his wife was out of the house.

Though he worried that no publisher in America would touch his new book—especially in light of the prosecution of
Hecate County
—he pushed on. He feared for his novel but also hoped for it. The nature of his difficulties is hard to make out; he blames “
interruptions
⁴⁶
and asides,” and indeed there were many claims on his work time in these years. But
problems with getting to write usually call for different scheduling, or patience, not for burning. Nabokov also blames age:

It had taken me
some forty years
⁴⁷
to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average “reality” … into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best.

The evidence suggests, rather than a playing out of energies, a surge in them. In these years he was prodigious, and his move to Cornell inaugurated a working prime not equaled, in terms of quantity and originality of work produced, by any of his contemporaries writing in English. The claim of problems gathering “local ingredients,” of lacking the “receptiveness and retention” of youth, is untrue on the face of it—and not interestingly untrue, not another example of Nabokov having us on in a meaningful way. He remained receptive and fully immersed in American materials.

These years of
Lolita
were also the years of some of his most extensive, most joyous wanderings in the West. Places visited—the Corral Log Motel, Afton, Wyoming; Teton Pass Ranch, near Jackson Hole; the “
optimistic
⁴⁸
and excellent Valley View Court,” Telluride’s only motel in ’51; the Chiricahua Mountains, near Portal, Arizona, a “sky island” range isolated in the desert—were ingredients from which he fashioned the locales of the novel. They were also places where he worked on the novel. The idea that his vision of his new book, his “brew of individual fancy,” awaited only the injection of local-colorist details—Canadian or Mexican would have served as well—advances an idea that Nabokov liked to propagate, that he was on the Mozartian side of things, his imagination supreme, largely self-contained. In fact the American context was determinative. It fed meaning and amplitude into fancy’s brew. The dead scrap he had
brought from Europe
⁴⁹
lived on, revived copiously, in America. The attempted burnings might have been uneasy reactions to how alarming was that growth.

America contributed specifics, and many readers respond with shocked delight to the
en passant
travelogue of their country at midcentury, filmed in period Technicolor as well as in noir black and white. America contributed its Promethean forwardness as well.
America
did
go the whole hog. It had not invented explicitness, but its authors displayed an affinity for going beyond, for bringing into conversation forbidden things.
Wilson was a new recruit
⁵⁰
to sexual frankness in fiction, joining such living predecessors and successors as Henry Miller, William Faulkner of
Sanctuary
, Norman Mailer of
The Naked and the Dead
, Jack Kerouac of
The Town and the City
and
On the Road
, and William Burroughs of
Junkie
and
Naked Lunch
. Nabokov assimilated to this immodest cadre. As he said in his afterword, “I am
trying to be an American
⁵¹
writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy.” He meant the right to represent
American vulgarity when needed, but also an American disposition to tell, to expose.