Monk

Before we proceed with the main narrative of “Lolita” (after completing a blogging round with the other books), I want to bring out a fun little note on Nabokov’s biting antipathy to Freud and his theories. It is obviously an important part of the Nabokovian perspective on the world and enjoys some significant play in his writing and in “Lolita”.

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Asked in 1966 in a National Educational Television interview why he “detested Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”

When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he would rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”

-- Alfred Appel, Jr., “The Annotated Lolita”

In John Ray’s closing paragraph we have less of a parody of porn-book prefaces and more of a direct imitation, and I have read and wanked to enough of them to be something of an expert. For those who are unread in this genre, such prefaces are assuring readers and would-be censors that the book has socially redeeming value and is hardly mere smut for our masturabatory pleasure. This is really educational! In the case of “Lolita”, of course, this is more than pretense.

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As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac - these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us - parents, social workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

-- "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov

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John Ray dates his note: August 5, 1955. The main narrative, involving Lolita and Humbert, occurs from the late 1940s through the early 1950s, the fresh beginning of the post-World War Two era with America in ascendent triumph and beginning a golden age of sorts, despite Humbert’s soiling of the country and one of its all-American darlings.

John Ray expounds a bit more on the issue of separating the art from the man, the pedophile from the author of “Loliita”. However, it may be worthwhile to pause for a clarifying observation that may seem obvious but which some readers could be confused about. Namely, a pedophile is not the actual author of “Lolita”.

As I recall an interview with one of Nabokov’s students about the great man, it was said that he may have liked young girls but he did not have a sexual interest in little girls - meaning, I guess, that he fancied college coeds, young women of maybe eighteen or nineteen or early twenties, but certainly not girls of nine or twelve years old. Nabokov’s personal life was exemplary, I take it, and it is the lurid subject of this novel that raised some delicate questions about the man, that made people wonder. In other words, in real life (as opposed to the fictional world between the covers of “Lolita”), it was unsavory art that cast some dark shadows on the man, rather than a reprehensible man that should be discounted in appreciation for the exalted piece of art that supposedly came from him, our Humbert Humbert.

It is perhaps a sad statement on human nature that it took a work about having sex with little girls to get a genius recognized and rewarded, our Vladimir Nabokov. This is the work of his that most of us love the most, and very few of us are truly interested in his lepidoptera. So, maybe we can at least be spared some self-righteous judgmentalism. We may not be proud of it, but we sometimes like it a little dirty. It can be a little exciting to get provoked, to wander down the dark, twisted alleyways of the soul. Let’s just enjoy this! No one was hurt in the writing and reading of “Lolita”.

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This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature 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, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. 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!

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

Our stalwart editor, John Ray, makes no apologies for refusing to censor Humbert’s text, and seems to offer the argument that this work of art may provide some redemptive recompense for the deviant and criminal life behind it.

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Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book), one would have to forgo the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of a sensuous existence of their own are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H.”’s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males - a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication) - enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H” describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

We carry on with Mr. John Ray’s foreword as he discusses his handling of the memoir presented to him by Humbert’s lawyer.

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My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.”’s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. It’s author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask - through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow - had to remain unlifted in accordance with the wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow us to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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Yes, you really don’t want to play around with the name Lolita, or as she is more formally known, Dolores Haze.

The primary text of “Lolita”, comprising around 99.9% of the novel is a first-person account by Humbert Humbert, which is sometimes said to be his legal defense for the trial he was to undergo, and other times taken to be more of a confession for his tormented soul, and perhaps sometimes just a bit of emotional prattling. The novel begins with a foreword consisting of a few pages by John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., which opens thus.

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“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert”, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses Make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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This beginning is not as artful as the one that kicks off the main narrative, but this suggestion of trials and perversions does pique the reader’s interest, no? And we now know going in that our narrator and protagonist is dead and was apparently in serious trouble. It is engaging.

"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 Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

-- "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov

Ah, that famous beginning, again! This time it is for real, though, in the sense that I mean to book-blog it. Yet, I feel particularly intimidated by this text. About 90% of the book compels quotation, and it really is a complex work that is way over my woozy head. But it is also much closer to my heart, being such a provocative combination or entanglement of the foulest perversion and the highest art. If it is not my number-one favorite novel, it is at least on a very short list.

Of course, all lovers of “Lolita” know that the book does not actually begin with this beginning. Humbert Humbert, our pedophile-protagonist and narrator is dead by the time we read this confession of his. We have a prefatory note that will explain all of this, though it too is fictional and part of the novel. (See what I mean about the complexity?) And we will go back and start there at the true beginning before coming back and picking up the main thread of this tale anew.