Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

One of the greats. And one of my all time favorites. I’ve read the book three or four times. It’s always a delight. At one time I read a lot of Nabokov. I’ve read all of his novels written in English. Pale Fire is also genius. I’ve read several of his earlier novels written in Russian. Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg and learned Russian, English, and French as a child. A few years ago I read his autobiography, Speak Memory. But he has written much more that I haven’t read, including short stories and poetry and non-fiction literary criticism. Lolita was his biggest hit. He made a ton of money from it, including the film rights. He wrote a screen adaptation for Kubrick’s film that wasn’t used. That Boris Pasternak won the Nobel and Nabokov did not, infuriated him.

Lolita is told in first-person from prison by a man using the pseudonym, Humbert Humbert. (It’s OK to laugh). He styles his narrative as a confession as he awaits trial for murder. But in explaining the motivation for the murder, Humbert reveals that he is also a child-rapist and kidnapper. The victim of the latter is Lolita. The victim of the murder is not revealed until the final pages of the book, so I won’t spoil it here.

Humbert Humbert is infatuated with a certain kind of girl-child he calls a “nymphet.” He specifies an age range of nine to fifteen. He meets Lolita when she is twelve and spends two years with her, then loses her and the book closes with a final meeting, Lolita age 17.

The book is structured symmetrically, what we learned in music theory to call, “arch form.” To the bottom left of the arch there is a short forward from a fictional psychotherapist named John Ray, telling us how Humbert’s prison manuscript came to his possession and spilling the news that per Humbert’s instructions the book is only to be published following the deaths of both Humbert and Lolita. Humbert imagines Lolita may live until 2020 or so (when Lolita, born in 1935, would be 85). But in fact, both characters barely outlive the writing of the manuscript. Humbert dies of a heart attack in prison, untried, in the fall of 1952. Lolita dies the same year, on Christmas Day, from complications of giving birth to a still-born baby.

The “John Ray” forward is mirrored on the lower right side of the arch by an afterward from Nabakov as himself, giving some thoughts about the book, it’s genesis, it’s meaning, it’s publication, it’s reception. The book was written in English, completed in 1953, and published in France, by the Olympia Press in 1955. The book was labeled filth, by some, but also named by Graham Greene in the London Sunday Times one of the three best books of the year. The American edition was published by Putnam and Sons in 1958 and was an instant, controversial, hit.

One step up the left side of the arch, the first section of the novel proper gives us Humbert’s story prior to meeting Lolita. She first appears on page 41. Humbert is born in Paris, 1910 (25 years older than Lolita). Age 13, he has a summer infatuation with a girl his age named Annabel Leigh. Do read Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “Annabel Lee” to get all the references. In that shared but not completely consummated passion, Humbert psychologically grounds his subsequent sexual desire. The mirror section of the arch in the final 40 or so pages of the novel give us Humbert’s life after he last sees Lolita, including the murder for which he’s in prison.

Once Lolita is met, Humbert becomes immediately obsessed. The next large chunk of the structure (call this the “Ramsdale” section for the name of the New England town where it takes place) traces Humbert’s path to integrating himself into Lolita’s life and making her his own. Lolita is the daughter of a widowed woman named Charlotte Haze who owns a home in Ramsdale where appears Humbert to rent a room in order to work on a book project. This is May, 1947. Lolita is 12. Humbert narrates the month of June in the household by reproducing a diary he kept at the time. In July, Charlotte sends her daughter to summer camp and Humbert into despair. Then she, Charlotte, offers to marry Humbert, and he, Humbert, realizes that marrying the mother would give him access to the daughter. Nabokov says in his afterward that this trick was the seed idea of his novel. Humbert and Charlotte marry, quietly. Then, catastrophe. Charlotte discovers Humbert’s diary from June. Then, apotheosis. In her mania at learning the truth about her lodger/husband, Charlotte dashes into the street and is struck by a car. Shock all around. After affairs are attended to, Humbert drives to summer camp to retrieve his orphan, step-daughter, Lolita. He takes her to a hotel. After extensive and anxious preparations for how he will finally have her, resulting only in a sleepless night, he does have her in the morning following her own initiative and willing participation.

Now I suppose I must pause here to say that I am fully aware that 12 year-old girls can not psychologically or legally “will” to have sexual relations with 37 year-old men. And this is, of course, the rub of Lolita. Or the sand in the vaseline, if you will (assuming you, dear reader, are old enough to “will”). I know that some readers will forever agree with some of Lolita‘s first readers that this book can only be fifth and should be left alone, or locked securely away. Others will say that the joy of Lolita is the roller-coaster ride of being variously (slowly up the hill) beguiled by Humbert’s humor, erudition, and prose-style, and then (quickly down the hill) horrified by remembering just what sort of man dear Lolita and dear reader are dealing with. But the most obvious way to read Lolita is as a novel. Humbert is not a maniac, he’s a character. No one is abused. There is no rape. Or kidnapping. No one gets murdered at the end. This is fiction. And the pleasure of fiction, enjoyed even more obviously in fiction literature than in movie fiction or even theater, is that it isn’t real. This is a game of words and imagination, the plot a puzzle to be worked out by an author and shared with a reader. If you enjoy the book, that’s the happy ending, no matter what end comes to the characters.

The very middle of the novel, the high-point of the arch-form, is the section the novel is famous for, where Humbert drives Lolita across and around these United States from motel to motel. They go everywhere and see everything. The trip takes a year – August 1947 to August 1948 – but only 34 pages. The writing here is absolutely perfect. Mid-century Motel America described by old world literature professor. It’s delicious. It’s especially fun to hear mentioned a place you’ve seen for yourself, for me: Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley; a fight Humbert and Lolita have on Third street in Los Angeles, just a block from my apartment. (But remember, it’s just a novel!)

Coming down now the right side of the arch, mirroring the long “Ramsdale” section, is the equally long “Beardsly” section. From their driving trip Humbert and Lolita return to New England and enroll Lolita in a girl’s school. Then, after a few months, yet another cross-country drive. This is the only place in the novel where the brisk plot briefly loses its forward motion and seems thrown into reverse. There’s some grinding of gears and then once the reader realizes what going on, the novel takes off again. Lolita leaves Beardsly with a plan and with a destination in mind. Somewhere in the southwest, she makes her escape. Humbert comes home alone. Humbert searches unsuccessfully. He has a pathetic affair with an adult woman. Years pass (3). And then a final pas de deux for Humbert and Lolita. She is 17, married, pregnant. Humbert meets her and the husband in her squalid but happy home. She needs money so that the family can re-locate to Alaska where the husband has a promised job. Humbert gives the money, realizes he is seeing her for the very last time, says goodbye, drives away.

Post-Lolita, having learned the information he sought of how she had made her escape, Humbert drives back to New England committed to murder, commits it, is arrested, spends two months writing this novel. Fine.

I first read Lolita in an undergraduate American Lit. class at UCLA. An example is made of Humbert Humbert of what undergraduate American Lit. students call, “an unreliable narrator.” Of course he is. No character telling their own story can be objective. First person narration is what subjective means. So Humbert justifies, and excuses, and defends, but we know his actions are indefensible. He calls himself a monster, but it’s clear he doesn’t believe it. He alternately idolizes and is annoyed by Lolita, but she’s no goddess or delinquent, merely a middle-schooler. Because it’s Humbert’s story we have no access to Lolita’s inner feelings, and perhaps we should be thankful we are spared.

Nabokov dismisses a couple of popular theories about the book in his afterward. That it’s really about “Old Europe debauching young America.” Or that it’s about Nabokov’s “love affair with the romantic novel.” Nabokov suggests replacing “romantic novel” with “English language” and says that’s about right. It is, after all, for the writing that one enjoys reading: the pleasure of reading beautiful sentences, humorous word-play, apt references, characters that are strange and sly and self-revealing without meaning to be. And a snappy plot with surprising reversals and hair’s-breadth escapes. Lolita is not pornography. It’s not erotic, not even not erotic in that queasy way that descriptions of other people’s sex lives can be. It’s just a good book.

I was of a mind to re-read Lolita after having read Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s final fiction which also features a first person narration by a man (more than twice Humbert’s age) sexually obsessed by a girl (about Lolita’s age) and similarly deluded about the actual feeling of love possible between two human beings. Another example of this story I’m tempted to re-read now is Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Here I go.