EDNOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Carolyn for this
item.
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The
New York Times
Forever Young
By
STACY SCHIFF
IN "circular skirt and scanties,"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" flounced into
print 50 years ago today. But before she tripped off the tongue and into the
literary canon, before she lent her name to inflatable dolls and escort
agencies, Lolita was a much-rejected manuscript,
huddling in a locked drawer. Her author spoke of her only in secret, on the
condition that his identity never be revealed. He kept
her out of the hands of the United States Postal Service. She was his
"time bomb." The wonder is that - in a confessional culture, in
taboo-toppling, hail-Britney times - she still
startles and sears.
Humbert Humbert claims to have written the text in 56 days, but Nabokov was less of a madman, and a Cornell professor to
boot. He labored over the pages for six years. Only in the summer of 1953 did
he first mention his novel "about a man who liked little girls" to an
editor. Nabokov was a fairly recent immigrant, but he
knew well that no one in
Nabokov's wife, Véra, had already warned that
the novel was not one for children. The first editor to read "Lolita" did not think it even a book for adults, at
least not for adults unwilling to serve jail sentences. In 1955,
At Doubleday, young Jason Epstein was quick to grasp that the novel was
infinitely more than the sum of its plot, that Nabokov
had "in effect, written 'Swann's Way' as if he had been James Joyce."
The book read like a thriller. Its pacing was quick. It was vastly amusing. And
Mr. Epstein could vote against "Lolita"
only "on the grounds of its outlandish perverseness."
In the Nabokov household that term translated
into "extreme originality." Which is how the work
was billed when - after a year of rejections - Véra Nabokov packed off "Lolita"
to
Deafening silence followed. Only at the end of the year did Graham
Greene, in
Legal considerations aside, not everyone took to the book. Edmund
Wilson was repulsed; like many, he had trouble untangling author and narrator. Evelyn Waugh thought the novel without merit, except as
smut. (On which count it was "highly exciting." To E. M. Forster
those same pages were "rather a bore.") Rebecca West found the novel
labored and ugly, a diluted blend of Peter de Vries
and S. J. Perelman. Worse, she found in "Lolita" a great deal of Dostoyevsky,
whom Nabokov abhorred.
All the same, there were plenty of admirers. Where
once Nabokov had been meek, he was by the spring of
1956 defiant. He shrugged off those who warned of the danger of American
publication. A serious work of art, "Lolita"
could not be proved to be "lewd and libertine." It was moreover a
tragedy. "The tragic and the obscene exclude one another," lectured Nabokov, who was a brilliant artist, but no lawyer. D. H.
Lawrence's reputation as one of the century's greats had done nothing to
protect "Lady Chatterley's Lover" from being tried for obscenity -
and in 1956 Nabokov was no
There were a few additional wrinkles, given American copyright law and
"Lolita's" foreign birth. Nabokov offered another consideration, possibly only as a
negotiating tactic with editors. Warned by Jason Epstein that he could neither
avoid an obscenity trial nor expect a fair one, he explained that he had no
choice but to publish. He could not survive on his Cornell salary alone. The
decision was "not a matter of principle but a matter of money." It is
perhaps noteworthy that in the course of a year on the road with Lolita, Humbert spends the
equivalent of Nabokov's Cornell salary on food and lodging alone.
Just as it was being considered by American publishers, the novel was
banned in
On receipt of the French news, Nabokov sat
down to commune with Graham Greene. "My poor 'Lolita'
is having a rough time," he lamented. The novel fell between two stools.
Those who picked it up looking for art were horrified; those in search of sex
were bored. Nabokov had a point: The net effect of
reading "Lolita" is indeed of going to bed
with a pervert and waking up with a professor.
But Nabokov was right too about the locked
drawer. The work includes lines that chill on every reading. "This was an
orphan," Humbert reminds us, as Lo winces in
pain, "This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed,
foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very
morning."
It was Walter Minton at Putnam's who managed in 1958 to satisfy all
parties and publish an American edition of "Lolita"
in a strategically brilliant fashion, capitalizing on her squalid past while
garlanding her with establishment kudos.
He made expert use of his author. Nabokov had
indeed researched "Lolita," but not the way
most people thought. He had studied the law regarding orphans, consulted tables
on sexual maturation, read "The Subnormal Adolescent Girl," taken
notes on acne and Tampax, borrowed faithfully from
the tabloids. He acknowledged that Lewis Carroll had long been on his mind.
Most reassuringly, he appeared in public with an essential accessory, his
56-year-old wife. In its ads Putnam went so far as to enlist American
sophistication. Here was a novel that had been banned and unbanned
by those "vacillating French."
THERE was no prosecution, except by the critics. "Lolita" left this paper's daily reviewer apoplectic.
The only kind thing Orville Prescott could say for the novel was that it was
not cheap pornography. (It was "highbrow pornography.") It was
unworthy of a reader's attention on two counts: "The first is that it is
dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly
fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive." Generally male
reviewers sympathized with Humbert and condemned Lolita. The novel may have fared well for the same reason;
it was after all Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary who
had stood trial. Humbert may be a pervert, but he is
not loose.
There was next to no reaction at Cornell. One of Nabokov's students
confessed to being shocked not by "Lolita,"
but by the idea that the professor who was uncomfortable reading aloud from
"Ulysses" had written it. The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science
Monitor and The Baltimore Sun refused to review the novel. It was "plain
pornography" in
It is difficult to imagine a work of fiction causing as much trouble
today, when "obscene" and "unpublished" fairly qualify as
antonyms. Blasphemy seems largely to have supplanted immorality. Meanwhile,
dewy-skinned and downy-limbed, "Lolita" has
not aged. How does she do it?
She travels light, without moral or agenda. Her plot still makes
headlines; "outlandish perverseness" is us. But art is meant to
transgress, to venture beyond what we permit ourselves. On all counts Nabokov's
is a deeply subversive work, a humorous novel about a state of damnation, an
enchantment and an ache. Sex was always less the point than sanity. With 50
years' perspective, it is easier as well to pry author from narrator. Humbert violates social convention. Nabokov's only immoral
act is to cast so much of the rest of literature in an unflattering light.
Stacy Schiff is the
author of "A Great Improvisation: