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Fw: [NABOKOV-L] Lolita and the American scene -TNR,Oct. 1958
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Jim Twiggs comments on this TNR review: "As you may know, TNR, which had printed Flint's positive notice of the Anchor abridgement of Lolita (and had also printed Brenner's "Art of the Perverse", chose not to assign the novel itself to a reviewer and instead dealt with it in a highly disapproving editorial. It's interesting to read this editorial now, along with three letters that it provoked."
Lolita and the Critics
THE NEW REPUBLIC/ vol 139, No. 17, issue 229 (October 27,1958)
"According to its author, the novel Lolita-at the top of the best-seller list for the fourth week--'has no moral in tow.' The disclaimer should be treated as another Nabokov jest, for this story of the two year rape of a pre-adolescent by a 'gentleman in his forties' (to quote The Kenyan Review critic) indeed has several morals - all true to the book and all false to life. And all ignored or dismissed by the critics."
The editor extracts a list of morals from Nabokov's own text: "The first moral is that by the age of 12 one American girl (and how many others between 9 and 15?) has already been 'hopelessly depraved' by 'modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth'...and that whatever indignities and brutalities are inflicted upon her thereafter add little or nothing to her degradation. The second moral is that prolonged assault of a 12-year old, though horrible, is no more sordid than ...the 'philistine vulgarity of the American scene,' which he finds 'exhilarating.' ...The third moral is that a 12-year old can be submerged in a ... 'cesspool and come out of it with things having (so says critic F. W. Dupee) fallen into place in a world which she views as 'just one gag after another'." because, as he concludes, Lolita "has not been destroyed...she has exhibited the strong capacity of the young to survive the worst abuses." Time sees an even more silvery lining: 'In the end, [Lolita] is pregnant and happy with a young goonlike husband. She has escaped. Nabokov seems to be asserting that all of creation is God...The shadow of a good life emerges'."
The editor adds that "There is in reality a shadow, unperceived by most of the serious critics but known to social workers and mental institutions. It is that of the real Lolitas who exist in darkness throughout their lives. And this shadow...is what obliges us to differ with our own reviewer who considered that 'to dwell on the book's more lurid side is to connive with witlessness.' The literate public longs for splendid, shocking satire, and Nabokov's wit is prodigious. But is this obscene chronicle of murder and of a child's destruction really 'wonderfully funny' (Noland Miller in The Antioch Review), a 'comic spectacle' (Richard Schickel in The Reporter), or 'wildly funny' (Time)? And can the judgment of so sensitive a critic as Lionel Trilling have meaning anywhere but in Hollywood ...when he says that 'in recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness. . . . No woman has been so charmingly evoked, in such grace and delicacy, as Lolita'?"
Correspondence November 3, 1958
Lolita: The Moral Issues ( R.W.Flint reply)
SIRS: Your lead editorial of October 27 takes me to task for having written in a review of Lolita that "to dwell on the book's more lurid side is to connive with witlessness." What I meant, of course, was the question of pornography rather than the nature of the moral and social problems raised by Mr. Nabokov's creation of his heroine. I should also add that I was reviewing the shortened and much expurgated excerpt from the book in the Anchor Review. It is too bad, perhaps, that American progressive education, American camplife and roadside civilization should appear in such a grim light in so good a book. But novels by Dostoevsky and Conrad have survived the wicked political and social caricatures on which they often lean for effect. I suspect Nabokov's novel will survive and that we'll just have to come to terms with it somehow. I still think it is a wonderful book.
Paul Lauter on "...elementary errors" - "One is almost embarrassed to point out the elementary errors in NR's editorial venture into literary criticism. The most dignified fluff is identifying the "hero" of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, with its creator, Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert ...can hardly be imagined, as you picture him, delivering Nabokov's "moral." Besides, Humbert ultimately does grow (as characters in novels frequently do) to recognize his own guilt in degrading her: And by then it is too late for Humbert, or for the reader, to continue trying to pass a tragic life off as a joke. You also imply that Nabokov's moral position extends no further than satire of middle-class roadside squalor. But the moral point of Lolita lies rather ...behind the billboards of America: purity of landscape beside depravity in motels, and beneath the "philistine vulgarity" a kind of fruitless innocence which his own creative debauchery can only kill. For Lolita never escapes the print of Humbert's lust; the spark of Time's "good life" (a Coaltown shack!) perishes-before it ever really lived- in Gray Star...Finally, Lolita is not a social document but a work of art whose humor can be missed only by morose reformers like John Ray, Jr., the pious Ph.D. of Nabokov's hilarious "Introduction." Indeed the book parodies case-studies, as well as mysteries, tour-guides, and pulp romances, by viewing comically their ersatz realities. For Lolita's humor, and its greatness, lies in Nabokov's ability to detonate American idiom against its own cliches, and thus to melt down, as no gloomy social pronunciamentos now can, the banal in American culture.
Amie R.Saroyan: Sirs, Thank you for the first perceptive and intelligent comments on Lolita. It is a grotesque commentary on the state of American letters that so overwhelming a majority of critics took the witty Mr. Nabokov at his word ("no moral in tow") and were joyfully seduced by the flashy, mocking mask of this brilliant and terrible book. Little Lolita herself (whether the author admits it or not) is an analogue of Nabokov's America, hard-boiled, comicbook- addicted, gum-chewing, and sobbing in the pillow at night. The rootless nightmare world in which he places her (cross-country from one restless cheap motel to the next) is the objective equivalent of her pathetic vulgarity and decadence. If we accept Nabokov's view of us (and to the extent that it is a true description) Lolita is the story not of the debauching and debauchery of one little 12-year old, but of an entire society. As such, it is tragic, pathetic-anything but comic. The insensitivity of our best critics to this fact is only one more proof of the frightening confusion of values (really, of the moral vacuum) that Nabokov describes as the American essence.
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