Poor, Poor Humbert

[monk222]

Before I put away Graham Vickers’s “Chasing Lolita”, I want to raise a pleasant off-beat note that not everybody condemns Humbert Humbert as a monstrous savage while sympathetically consoling little Lo, and, no, I am not making recourse to dirty old men, though, in my humble opinion, this is an overly maligned demographic - can’t one be young at heart?

Vickers fills out his survey of the uses or abuses of “Lolita” in popular culture with a discussion of Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, which is about her underground reading group and their experience of reading Nabokov’s novel. Of course, this is an underground affair because in Iran women aren’t even suppose to read, or at least certainly not materials like “Lolita”, which, it is worth pointing out, is an abuse of women that Humbert Humbert would find unconscionable.

Justine Brown is a Canadian writer who was part of this reading group, and she recalls when she was twelve and people started telling her about the birds & the bees and bracing her for the world of sex. One woman gave her “Lolita” to read (an interesting choice for sex education):

I wept bitterly when I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita… A lady named Carol, who parachuted into my life like a ’70s Mary Poppins and quickly became a friend, slipped me the book. In retrospect, I see a warning featured prominently: be aware. She presented the book by way of proscription - to alert me to the erotic power of nubiles and the pitfalls of that power, to the magnetism of 12 year-old girls, for some men. It was 1977, I was 12 and so was Brooke Shields. “Pretty Baby” was shedding its soft “Penthouse” glow in movie houses around the world, and Roman Polanski would soon be on the run, leaving his adolescent lover in disarray. We had our brown limbs, our cut-offs and halter tops; we had our ice cream and lip gloss. Advice was in order but Carol was too subtle for that. (Others were more direct: “Now everyone will want to screw you,” remarked one of the grown-ups bracingly.)

Carol gave me a copy of “Lolita” instead of a sermon. And that is how I came to read it, in two rainy summer afternoons, when I was 12. And when I emerged tearfully from the bedroom, she just nodded and opened her arms, for I was a sensitive kid. “Poor, poor Humbert!” I cried. “Lolita was so mean!”

Some girls really do understand! Of course, that was her response at twelve, and interestingly enough Vickers doesn’t report on her current adult response. Maybe he is encouraging us to buy Nafisi’s book, but I think I probably just got the best part.