What judge? Why, our own dear Humbert Humbert. How could he possibly be
worth his salt as a judge? He is a murderer, who denies that his murder is
morally wrong. His "moral apotheosis" -- what a joke -- is almost
exclusively a self-indulgent wallowing in guilt feelings about Lolita. All
right, he gives her some money. (It's worth considering to what extent this is a
criminal's payment of hush money.) But what is he thinking about during his
final meeting with her on 23 September when she is pregnant?
Overwhelmingly, his concern is to establish Quilty's name and whereabouts, so
that he can kill him. Consider how he talks to Mrs Chatfield on his return to
Ramsdale the next day, 24 September? She is rude in saying she doesn't
approve of early marriages (i.e. Lolita's), but he thinks, and clearly still
thinks, in gaol, that this justifies his replying to her telling him that the
"poor boy" Charlie Holmes "has just been killed in Korea" by asking
"didn't she think 'vient de,' with the infinitive, expressed recent
events so much more neatly than the English 'just,' with the past. But I had to
be trotting off, I said." This is a nasty, snobbish, sadistic man, consumed
not by guilt about what he has done to Lolita but by hatred of other males
(Charlie Holmes, Clare Quilty) who have had some kind of sexual relationship
with her. He is planning to commit a foul murder the next day. How could
such a man's nonchalantly dismissing that murder be evidence that it did not
happen?
A further thought. If Nabokov is correctly quoted as saying that Humbert
changes morally, because he comes to love Lolita "as a woman should be loved",
then, to put it charitably, Nabokov himself must have allowed his
"creature" Humbert's rhetoric to seduce his own moral sense. Humbert is Lolita's
stepfather. What kind of "moral apotheosis" would lead him to "love her
as a woman should be loved" and beg her to leave her husband and come to
live with him? This is a superior kind of incest, is it?
Anthony Stadlen