Jim Twiggs [to JM's "Now I must make
a 'mea culpa' to Jim Twiggs. I was certain that Nabokov couldn't have been
acquainted with the story concerning Wittels's Irma, and still have written
"Lolita" since, in the background, there's a very sick mind intent on using and
tormenting a real child."] No apology needed (of course), but I'm
pleased to have Jansy's new thoughts on the matter.
JM: Jim Twiggs indicates two articles in the
TLS* and notes that he's "presented the Kraus-Wittels story only as
paralleling Lolita in certain very limited respects, and not as an influence or
even a source." The "new thoughts" his reference to
Wittels stimulated in me were warmly received and kindly
dismissed.
Thanks to him, though, I discovered that I'd been mostly
considering Lolita's oedipic "central
theme" as of a secondary importance ( i.e, reduced to a
literary structural device) as regards the adventurous tales
involving HH's and Lolita's love-affair. Besides, very often my
focus aimed solely at the voiceless young girl, perhaps
because the media, and even the book-cover, insistently cried
out "Lolita" (Nabokov's). In a way, although very conscious of HH
as an unreliable narrator, I forgot to seriously consider his
narrator's place in the context of social exclusion and
his isolation at the time he penned "Lolita, or the
Confessions of a White, Widowed Male" (its title in full).
Humbert's extended recollections of his passion for Lolita are so vivid in
his confessions that it's almost as if I,
myself, could watch her from my window, without suffering from
hallucinations - as HH must have.
Actually, how important this girl,
this Lolita, really is? Was real-life Sally Horner rescued
from the "trash of life" to become "valuable and eternal" thanks to the
story of Lolita's plight (cf. A.Dolinin's views)? What about Kraus-Wittels's,
equally real, Irma?
How deeply did Nabokov care about "Lolita"? In "Strong
Opinions" he recognizes, very objectively, that "my
little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the
cuteness and limpidity."(25) ..."the heart is a remarkably stupid reader"
(41). When asked why he wrote
Lolita he answered: "It was an interesting thing to
do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure,
for the sake of the difficulty... I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like
composing riddles with elegant solutions."
My non-Literary views definitely reject the
hypothesis that Nabokov could have acquired his inspiration from
the lives of real little girls, to the point of reproducing them in his
writing ( but not that he didn't find it in the perverts's reports). The
chief reason for my very personal belief lies in that Nabokov
chose to have their story told by a kidnapper, who seldom
allows us to see events from the girl's perspective, or to hear her
directly. If Nabokov was reproducing an actual victim's most important
features and impulses, in an enticing golden tale registered by a
pervert, he would have become an accomplice (the pervert's,
and perhaps the girl's). And Nabokov certainly wasn't either one or
the other. What we get in Nabokov's novel is the
unfolding of an unreliable oscillating "arc of character" and, most
often, a report about the material consequences of a
pervert's acting out his fantasies. If there's
pity towards HH and Lolita it's not justified by any
intellectual consideration that "art rescued her from 'the trash of
life'," but something more concrete, after the book is closed, when the
reader has acquired a different experience of perversion and
now regards other counfounded erring perverts and their victims
under a new light.
Freud once observed ( Tolle,
lege "Three-Essays", 50**) that the dreams of a neurotic are a
pervert's because "neuroses are, so to say, the negative of
perversions" (165). To follow HH's narration from his perverted
perspective is, for a neurotic, to live them as pure dream-fantasy only. There's
too much reality in Sally Horner or in Irma to warrant me, as a lay-reader, a
place outside an actual perversion, should I pair them with Lolita. Or
consider Lolita anything but "a figment of Nabokov's imagination":
"We know that "Lolita
is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book - the book that
treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life
that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinatorial talent to make it
real."(15). Humbert "never existed. He did
exist after I had written the book. While I was writing the book, here and
there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen
who pursued little girls: a kind of interesting coincidence but that's about all
[...] Lolita didn't have any original. She was born in my own mind...I don't
think I know a single little girl....Lolita is a figment of my
imagination"(16) (Strong Opinions).
Yes!
***
....................................................................................................................................
The Times Literary Supplement, November 27,
1998 Sources of inspiration for 'Lolita', by Ernest Machen,
Berkeley. (excerpts)
The article begins mentioning the suit against Pia
Pera's "Lo's Diary" which "purports to tell the story of Lolita from the
girl's point of view"and offers "Ms Pera's postmodern notions of
authorship," when Machen quotes Vladimir Nabokov, in 1959, "Dear
Mr Girodias, . . . I wrote Lolita". The author states that "Nabokov read
an anonymous Ukrainian paedophile's 108-page sexual autobiography that was
appended to the French edition of Volume Six of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the
Psychology of Sex. (We know Nabokov read it, because he says so in a letter to
Edmund Wilson, who had sent him the piece.)" He says that several "features
of Lolita, both trivial and less so, seem to derive from this erudite Ukrainian
pervert's 'Confession'." E. Machen traces a few parallels between
them and adds that "perhaps most fundamentally, both narrate their own
stories, with the same disorienting effect, for the reader, of being taken into
the confidence of an intelligent, sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is
precisely this effect that makes Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier
novella on the same theme, The Enchanter." According to him "Nabokov scholars
have resolutely ignored the Ukrainian's "Confession"...even though it was first
brought to light as a source for Lolita as long ago as 1979 by Simon Karlinsky,
and rendered into English by Donald Rayfield." Dmitri
Nabokov "rebuts... what he takes to be Rayfield's contention
'about the 'central theme' of The Enchanter and Lolita. And yet, the
author believes that Dmitri Nabokov and Donald Rayfield are both wrong, as it
turns out. "The 'central theme'...goes back beyond Nabokov's 1937 novel The
Gift...and even beyond his 1934 novel Invitation to a Beheading....where it
makes its first appearance in Nabokov's work. As Alexander Dolinin has recently
pointed out...the ultimate source seems to be a story that appeared the previous
year, 1933, called 'Skazochnaia printsessa' (The fairytale princess), by
Valentin Samsonov.... "
The Times Literary Supplement, September 9,
2005, What happened to Sally Horner? Alexander Dolinin
(excerpts)
" A real-life source of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Ever since
Lolita was published...critics have spent much effort and learning to explicate
the hundreds of allusions, identify concealed quotations and parodic echoes, and
pinpoint possible sources for Vladimir Nabokov's novel. This exciting and
productive paper-chase very rarely, however, goes beyond literature to the real
world that Nabokov explored no less attentively than poetry and
fiction...Working on Lolita, Nabokov, as his biographer Brian Boyd writes,
'undertook research of all kinds' and, in particular, noted newspaper reports of
accidents, sex crimes and killings...But what Boyd seems to overlook is that
Nabokov not only noted these newspaper reports in search of details but
implanted them into Lolita in a most peculiar way."... " I have found a slightly
different version of the same report in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August
19, 1952. There La Salle is more bluntly called "a middle-aged sex offender" and
Sally Horner his "cross-country love slave"... In his copy Nabokov crossed out
the very euphemisms -'a middle-aged morals offender' and 'a cross-country slave'
-that Humbert Humbert uses in his conversation with Lolita..." - "For the
author of Lolita, the 'perfect dictator' in his imagined world, the short and
unhappy life of a chubby brown-haired American teenager would have had a
different meaning...Trampled Sally Horner... was a deserving object for
Nabokov's 'piercing pity', and for the transformation of her story, through art,
'into something valuable and eternal.'. Referring to her in his masterpiece
about an abused American girl somewhat like herself, he not only paid tribute to
his 'given world' source but, in a sense, redeemed the cruelty of Sally's fate,
which otherwise would have been for ever buried in 'the trash of
life'."
**- Freud, S: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905), SE vol.VII: "The sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight
degree - now in this direction, now in that - beyond the narrow lines imposed as
the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor
degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs
all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the
child, and which, by being supressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual
aims - by being sublimated - are destined to provide the energy for a great
number of our cultural achievements. When, therefore, any one has
become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say
that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of
inhibited development. All psychoneurotics are persons with
strongly marked perverse tendencies, which have been repressed in the course of
their development and have become unconscious. Consequently their unconscious
phantasies show precisely the same content as the documentarily
recorded actions of perverts - even though they have not read
Kraff-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, to which simple-minded people
attribute such a large share of the responsibility for the production of
perverse tendencies. Psychoneuroses are, so to speak, the negative
of perversions." (50)
*** -Fritz Wittels (indicated by J.Twiggs) and
the Ukranian pervert (retrieved by E.Machen) present a different
perspective from the other true story (Dolinin's Sally
Horner). Like in Nabokov's novel, the first two relate to the
perpretators's emotions, fantasies, actions: they focus on the
perverts. They invite the reader to witness, even enjoy it, how
a pervert's mind and fantasies operate, how he acts in the world. The
reader is free to surmise what kind of a threat he is to himself and to society.
E.Machen notes that "perhaps most fundamentally," HH and the
Ukranian "both narrate their own stories, with the same disorienting
effect, for the reader, of being taken into the confidence of an intelligent,
sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is precisely this effect that makes
Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier novella on the same
theme.." That's exactly my point (now).