On Friday, February 24, 2012, Steve Norquist wrote:
Human and/or bot error seems to have kicked this post into a separate thread in the archives; if I may I'd like to re-post it here as originally intended.--Steve Norquist"In any case, it is a matter of indifference to me whether VN (or anyone else, for that matter) fantasizes about sex with underage girls, so long as he stops short of putting his fantasies into action..."--Jim Twiggs
JT seems to make some contradictory statements in his comments on the MacLean article. The statement quoted above is easy enough to agree with; indeed, the act of writing a novel such as Lolita requires imagining such fantasies. However, he goes on to almost endorse MacLean's assumptions about VN's supposed "unseemly urges" in comments such as "...passion for sex, much of it with underage girls, runs throughout VN's work," and this I don't agree with. JT cites the poem Lilith (originally written by VN in Russian in 1928) as support for his statements, even though VN himself, in the author's notes to Poems and Problems, offers that "Intelligent readers will abstain from examining this impersonal fantasy for any links with my later fiction," and that the poem was written "...to amuse a friend." There is a huge difference between artistic fantasy on the one hand, and assuming a likelihood that someone capable of a Lolita is somehow in the same league as an incurable pedophile who must use "stuffed-shirtedness" as a "firewall" against unseemly urges! Again, such statements put MacLean on the same intellectual level as H. S. Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke, who found it logical that since VN wrote about sordid subjects, he must have engaged in sordid behavior (using a supposed Sun Valley sighting of VN with an 11-year-old girl as "evidence"). I disagree with any such suppositions about VN's urges and passions.
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I received Norquist’s message of 2/23/12, which was reposted at his request, but I have not, till now, had a chance to answer.
In addition to Norquist, Matt Roth and Jansy Mello have responded to my message of 2/20/12.
Meantime, a separate
(but overlapping) discussion, under the same subject-designation, has sprouted up, involving Stadlen, Gwynn, and Norquist.
I’ll say something about all of these contributions. The interested reader, if there are any, can follow along, easily enough I think, by referring to the postings labeled “Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls.”
1. NORQUIST. Our differences are perhaps as much of temperament as of substance. Norquist, like so many others nowadays, seems deeply invested in protecting the purity of VN and the motives (or passions) behind his works. At my age--I am very old--I could care less whether VN’s
inner life met what I regard as conventional prudish standards or not. Nor do I care that Lolita is as popular with pedophiles as it is in college English courses--which is not to say that I don’t deplore pedophilia and child abuse as much as anyone else. My main purpose in writing about MacLean’s remarks was to say that anyone seriously interested in such questions about VN--which have been with us since the day Lolita was published--should look to heavyweights like Amis and Banville rather than pick on a glib and to me inoffensive blogger. I also wanted to protest, in a mild way, Boyd’s offering, as an “antidote” to MacLean’s “insinuations,” a piece of stale conference-style puffery by guest celebrity Jeffrey Masson. Many of the earliest commentators on Lolita liked to pretend that it was not “really” about sex and child-rape but was a fancy allegory of one kind or another. Some
said it was not about sex but about love. In a similar spirit, the current crop of commentators apparently need reassurance that far from being a “transgressive” writer, VN was just about the most politically correct guy you’d ever want to read. Working novelists like Amis and Banville know better. And they have, like Maar, discussed these old questions in a fresh new way.
As for the VN quote about his poem “Lilith,” I’m not
convinced of its importance. (I don’t, however, know the full context.) Many writers--VN not least among them--are manipulative, self-deceived, or mischievous when discussing their own work. Many of them say different things to different audiences at different times and different places and for different reasons. Furthermore, as Gore Vidal pointed out in his funny review of Strong Opinions, VN had a valid reason for being touchy in some of his interviews. “Periodically, the Professor is obliged to note that he himself is not repeat not attracted to those very young girls who keep cropping up in his work. (‘Lewis Carroll liked little girls. I don't.’) At these moments, our proud Black Swan becomes an uneasy goose, fearful of being cooked by Cornell's board of regents.” Vidal might also have mentioned VN’s equally legitimate fear of having his work censored by the government.
Most important, the connection the quote denies is so obvious that no one could fail to see it. Mentioning it only makes it more obvious. The business about writing the poem to amuse a friend is a marvelous touch.
To conclude my response to Norquist, I should point out that I explicitly acknowledged that VN “seems to have been a model of health and good citizenship” in some of the ways that matter to me and that I agreed with Gwynn about the supposed Sun Valley escapade. But if Norquist doubts the extent of the “passion for sex, much of it with underage girls, [that] runs throughout VN's work," he should certainly read the essays by Amis and Banville--which is what I hoped everyone would do in the first place.
2. ROTH. Thanks, Matt. It seems likely that this is the passage that MacLean had in mind--this part of it in particular: “. . . creative imagination . . . would have led them to seek an outlet in fiction and make the characters in their books do more thoroughly what they might themselves have bungled in real life.” In Chapter 9 of Speak,
Memory, Maar quotes a similar statement by Jean Paul: “But my inward fantasies and representations have reduced and consumed my outward life; and this only because I represented them.” Although I would not apply such ideas as general truths, I would expect them to be true, in limited and specific cases, for a good many writers. Twenty or so years ago, I was myself close friends with a man who would almost certainly have killed himself if he hadn’t been able to finish and publish a novel in which the protagonist commits suicide at the end.
Matt’s point of logic is well taken and neatly said. But here again, I would expect there to be particular exceptions in particular circumstances.
As for what he says about crime and criminals in the rest of the passage Matt provided, I think VN is guilty of a false generalization. I’d be very surprised if there aren’t at
least a few highly intelligent, sophisticated, non-brutish lawbreakers at loose in the world at any given time. The figure of the Master Criminal is too compelling to exist only in fiction and folklore.
3. MELLO. I appreciate Jansy’s kind words and thank her also for not complaining about my use of the words “Freud” and “crackpot” in the same sentence. She understands, of course, that Freud-Fliess was a bizarre episode.
I’m especially grateful to Jansy for reminding us that there’s no one correct reading of a book, or one correct way of looking at things in general, and that each of us brings his/her own
experiences and perspective to the task at hand, whatever it might be. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be mentioned, but in the heat of our arguments we’re constantly forgetting it. Wittgenstein, in dismay at the course of his discussions with one of his best friends and strongest influences, the economist Sraffa, wrote (in a letter) that
. . . The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.
Literary discussions often follow the same pattern, with nobody being understood in just the way he/she would like. And then sometimes things go completely to hell:
As it happened, during a course at Berkeley when I was enthusiastically lecturing to students about Lolita the novel, a girl Lolita’s age was kidnapped in a nearby town and raped and murdered. It became impossible then to carry on about Nabokov’s fantastic wit, magnificent descriptive powers, and splendid achievement in the realm of lyrical imagination. A real girl was dead. The novel was suddenly nauseating. --Leonard Michaels, The Essays of Leonard Michaels, p. 31.
If anyone is inclined to point out that Michaels has used the word “real” without putting it in quotes, please don’t do it.
4. STADLEN-GWYNN-NORQUIST. Good luck in sorting out the matter of Humbert’s possible redemption. After years of vacillating, I’m inclined to think that the uncertainty is deliberate. Of possible relevance, however, is a passage in Maar’s Speak, Nabokov (p. 134). The source, Maar says, is a 1959 VN interview conducted by Robbe-Grillet. Here’s the passage:
The novelist [i.e., Nabokov] describes its tragic finale in elevated terms: after the emotional tempest of sensual passion, Humbert in the end experiences human and divine love. It is only through divine love that the Lilith demon is finally exorcized.
Clearly, this
would seem to support the redemptive view. But does the text support the author’s intentions? That question still remains.
Maar continues with some useful discussion of the Gnostic v. Worldly Delights tension in Nabokov's writing.
The interview in question does not appear
in Strong Opinions. It is mentioned by Boyd (American Years, p. 398) but without any description of its contents. Field (Life and Art, pp. 319-320) offers some sketchy but interesting details about the interview.
Apparently this document, if it ever appeared in English, is hard to come by. In any case, I think that few readers in the 1950s would have used the phrase “divine love” to describe the novel. Discussion of VN’s Gnosticism was still several years away, wasn’t it?
Jim Twiggs
P.S. Because I was so long in responding to Norquist, Roth, and Mello, this message does not take into account any postings from
Saturday or Sunday. I can tell, from looking at my in-box that I've fallen far behind.