What Do Women Want? (11 page)

 

 

The language of
Lolita
is as amazing in its way as the language of
Ulysses
or
A Clockwork Orange.
Nabokov has the same lexicographical itch as Joyce or Burgess, but because he learned Russian and English almost simultaneously in his privileged childhood, he likes to play the two languages off against each other. Like so many of the most original modern novelists, he started literary life as a poet. The poet, W. H. Auden says, has first to woo not his own muse but Dame Philology. Vladimir Nabokov wooed that mistress for years before surrendering to
Lolita.
The novel teems with loving lexicography, crystalline coinages, lavish listmaking—all the unmistakable symptoms of rapture of the word.

“Nymphet” was a Nabokovian coinage for this novel, as were the more obscure items “libidream,” “pederosis,” “nymphage,” and “puppy-bodies.” As with
Ulysses,
not a page fails to amaze; not a page fails to reward the most diligent rereading. (French critics pointed out that Ronsard had used the word “nymphette” to mean little nymph—a fact Nabokov knew—but he created an English term, which has stuck because we have no substitute to describe that feral girl-woman who drives the middle-age man mad.)

Lolita
is a novel about obsession. It has this in common with
Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary,
Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even
Portnoy’s Complaint.
Impossible obsession fuels literature. Many writers are obsessed with obsession.

The subject was hardly a new one for Nabokov—though the form the obsession takes is new in this novel: nymphage. Luzhin in
The Defense
is obsessed with chess; Sebastian Knight in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
with literary immortality; Kinbote in
Pale Fire
with regaining his Zemblan kingdom; Herman in
Despair
with killing his double, Fyodor in
The Gift
with transcending time through literary creation. (One could continue the list through all Nabokov’s novels.)

In
Speak, Memory,
Nabokov’s autobiography, he terms himself a “chronophobiac” (another delicious invention), and to a great extent
Lolita
is a book about chronophobia every bit as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets are.

Humbert Humbert is in love with something that by definition cannot last. That prepubescent state he calls nymphage lasts from nine to thirteen, a fleeting four years, often less. The honey-hued shoulders, the budbreasts, the brownish fragrance of the bobby-soxed nymphet, are all destined to be abolished by the advent of womanhood—which Humbert despises every bit as much as he worships nymphage. Humbert’s dilemma puts the dilemma of all obsessional lovers in relief. He loves what he can never possess. Time rips it away from him even as he dreams of possessing it. No Elizabethan poet writing sonnets about gathering rosebuds while ye may could convey this better than Nabokov does with his nymphet.

So the villain here is time. And the dilemma is the dilemma of the human being who foresees his own death. It is not coincidental that so many of Nabokov’s heroes are doomed and so many of his novels are cast in the form of posthumous autobiographies. His subjects are nothing less than mutability and time, Eros and Death, the twin subjects of all real muse poetry.

Like so many Nabokovian narrators, Humbert Humbert is a man obsessed with an irretrievable past. When he refinds his nymphet in Ramsdale (even the place names in
Lolita
are full of sexual innuendo), he recognizes at once that he has discovered the reincarnated essence of his Riviera puppy love, who perished of typhus decades earlier:

 

 

Time is what Humbert seeks to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Nabokov has caught the essence of obsession no less than Thomas Mann in
Death in Venice.
Obsession has a life of its own: The object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.

The obsession of Humbert with Lolita has been compared to many things: the obsession of the artist with the creative process, the obsession of the butterfly collector with his specimen, the obsession of the exile with retrieving a lost homeland (a characteristic Nabokovian theme). It is all these things, and more. And yet the book works, finally, because it is the story of a man maddened by an impossible love, the impossible love for an impossible object: a banal little girl who calls him “kiddo.” Aren’t all impossible, obsessional loves inexplicable to other people? Do our friends
ever
understand? Isn’t that inexplicability the wonder and the terror of obsessional loves?

In looking for the “sources” of
Lolita,
we have to look no further than Nabokov’s genius, but it
is
useful to remember that he translated
Alice in Wonderland
into Russian, and that Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
is one of the seminal books in his life, as it is in the life of so many other Russian writers. As D. M. Thomas said of Pushkin, “The sexual and creative instincts in him ran as parallel as the twin blades of a skater.” The same surely can be said of Nabokov, and nowhere is this clearer than in
Lolita.

The publishing history of
Lolita
is almost as Nabokovian as any of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations; it seems almost a case of life imitating art. Nabokov finished
Lolita
in the spring of 1954 and “at once began casting around for a publisher.” Since
Lolita
is thirty this year—or at least her first American trade edition is—we should try to remember the state of American publishing in 1954, when I myself was in nymphage.

In those benighted days, it was impossible to obtain a copy of John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
outside the rare-book room of a university library or a private erotica dealer. Believe me, I tried. Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
could not be purchased at your local bookstore. The raciest sex manual available to the panting adolescent was
Love Without Fear
by Eustace Chesser, M.D. And
A Stone for Danny Fisher
by Harold Robbins was as close as most adolescents of the fifties got to “literary” sex education. Even Normal Mailer, in
The Naked and the Dead,
had replaced “fuck” with “fug.” And though he was far more explicit in
The Deer Park
(1955), he was punished for it by the reviewers.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the typescript of
Lolita
was rejected by four major New York publishers. Although the novel contained not one “mural word” (as Nabokov put it),
Lolita
was a genuinely new creation, and genuinely new creations do not usually fare well until they have been safely certified. It was not only that
Lolita
dealt with forbidden obsessions:
Lolita
had the additional demerit of being literary. American puritanism is more comfortable with sex when it stays in the gutter than when it rises to the level of art.

Even more amazing than the responses of the publishers were the early responses of Edmund and Elena Wilson and Mary McCarthy to this masterpiece, which Nabokov thought “by far my best English work.” I am amazed to read in the Nabokov-Wilson letters what the usually randy Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov of
Lolita:
“I like it less than anything of yours I have read.” Mary McCarthy, who did not finish the manuscript, called the “writing terribly sloppy throughout.” (See
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
for 30 July 1954, 9 August 1954, 30 November 1954.)

Now, the responses of even the greatest writers to their contemporaries’ books are not always accurate—for a variety of reasons not all of which have to do with envy. Virginia Woolf called
Ulysses
“an illiterate underbred book . . . the book of a self-taught working man . . . egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.” Woolf happened to be a great literary critic as well as novelist—and here she was utterly misguided. Authors rarely recognize their contemporaries; often they are blind to them. For every Ezra Pound, Anthony Burgess, John Updike, or Henry Miller who is open enough to praise the new, there are a thousand Edmund Wilsons who say: “I wish I could like the book better.” Even that regretful tone is rare; more usually authors attack the new with contemptuous relish, pronouncing it boring, sloppy, or underbred simply
because
it brings fresh vitality to the language. Something new in literature is often gloriously oblivious to old rules of decorum, old limits of literary expression; its vulgarity and vitality are frequently so intertwined that they cannot be separated.

That Nabokov was depressed by Wilson’s response, we have on record from the Wilson-Nabokov letters. He had brewed this novel for twenty-five years in two languages: How could he not be depressed at presenting a rare vintage and having it pronounced vinegar?

Had Edmund Wilson not dubbed the book “repulsive,” “unreal,” and “too unpleasant to be funny,” had he not conveyed these sentiments to his own publisher, the publishing history of
Lolita
might have been different. As it was, fate—which is such an important character in
Lolita
—arranged that
Lolita
have her first publication in English in France, in 1955, under the auspices of Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press (heir to his father’s Obelisk Press, Henry Miller’s publisher).
⁹
Girodias,
père
and
fils,
had been publishing literary erotica and not-so-literary erotica for the expatriate market in Paris since the thirties. Though he was condemned by some as a porn king, praised by others as “the Lenin of the sexual revolution,” the fact remains that Maurice Girodias was courageous enough to publish William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, J. P. Donleavy, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Nabokov’s
Lolita
when others were too afraid of censorship to try.

I am privileged to count among my Nabokovian treasures a somewhat battered two-volume set of the first edition of
Lolita,
The Olympia Press, 8 Rue de Nesle, Paris 6
^e
, printed in August 1955 by S.I.P., Montreuil, France, 900 francs per volume. The printing was small, perhaps only five thousand copies, but big enough so that Graham Greene found a copy and pronounced
Lolita
one of the three best novels of ’55 in the
Times
of London.

It was Greene who conferred the sort of literary blessing upon the book that John Updike and Henry Miller were later to confer upon
Fear of Flying.
Greene saw literature and language where others had seen only perversion and pornography.
Lolita
’s eventual triumph can be traced ultimately to his intervention. Following Greene’s discovery of
Lolita,
Jason Epstein printed portions of the novel in the
Anchor Review.
Following that, Walter Minton of Putnam’s and George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson (of the U.K. firm that bore their names) entered into an arrangement with Girodiasto publish
Lolita
in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. One third of the royalties were to go to The Olympia Press, but
Lolita
was at last to have mainstream United States and United Kingdom publication. The hero of this chapter in what came to be called
L’Affaire Lolita
is Nigel Nicolson (son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West), who sacrificed his parliamentary victory in the Bournemouth elections in part because of his constituents’ disapproval of his publication of
Lolita.

It was widely assumed that
Lolita
would provoke legal action in England and the United States. The Olympia Press edition had been banned at one point in Paris at the request of British authorities. The novel was even debated in the British cabinet, but the publication proceeded without legal impediment. A New Zealand ban came later.

United States publication took place on 21 July 1958 (Putnam’s). United Kingdom publication on 6 November 1959 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The U.S. edition hit number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list in January 1959; it was eventually nudged out of that place by another child of Russia,
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak. Those were the days when literary books actually appeared on bestseller lists with some regularity.

Most of
Lolita
’s reviews paid more attention to
L’Affaire Lolita
than to the book. As if Nabokov’s afterword did not exist, many journalists boringly debated the old literature-versus-pornography question. Not surprisingly, a number of the reviewers sound like the author impersonating “John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.” Vladimir Nabokov had an uncanny ability to anticipate everything in his novels, even their critical reception. One exception to the generally banal level of the commentary was Elizabeth Janeway’s review in the
New York Times Book Review.
Janeway, with her usual good sense and lack of prudery, spotted the quality of the book right away and understood that its tragicomedy was Shakespearean in nature: