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The Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown has a weekly column
in the Jamaica Observer called "In Our Time". Today he
writes about the 50th anniversary of Lolita.
http://jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20050917T200000-0500_88582_OBS_REMEMBERING_LOLITA.asp
Remembering Lolita
In Our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, September 18, 2005
'She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four
feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was
Dolly in school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.
But in my arms she was always Lolita.' (Vladimir
Nabokov: Lolita)
It's mid-September, the dog days of the year, and the
great natural and manmade tragedies of the wide world
continue apace. In Iraq, the insurgency and its
carnage go right on escalating: 200 dead, 800 wounded
in Baghdad alone in the past two days.
On the US Gulf Coast and fanning out from it the
desolation endures: whole towns flattened like
matchsticks, whole populations turned into vagrants
dependent on the kindness of strangers. And with the
US Senate's confirmation hearings of John Roberts, G W
Bush's smooth-talking nominee for Chief Justice, the
process that has been turning, by swift degrees, that
once laid-back country into a frowning theocracy
advances, so smoothly you can almost hear the next cog
in that dread machine clicking into place like a key
opening a lock.
But there remains a higher realm, that of Spirit (not
to be confused with Religion). The late, great
Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov believed
that evil was spectral, and that, notwithstanding all
evidence to the contrary, the world was good.
Last week (the fourth anniversary of 9-11) was the
50th anniversary of the publication of his Lolita,
arguably the great novel of the 20th century. So let
the carnage and the desolation recede for the moment.
Evil is spectral, and the world is good. Someone
should clap hands and sing.
The seeming irony is that one should relate such a
happy assertion to the author of Lolita, which when it
appeared in 1955 caused a frenzy of denunciation in
the west, surpassing that which had got DH Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover furiously banned 30 years
earlier. Lolita was first published in Paris, then
banned in France, then un-banned and re-banned again -
all this before it first appeared in England, in 1959.
Meanwhile, high and low alike vilified Nabokov's
masterpiece as pedophilia! Edmund Wilson found it
repulsive. Evelyn Waugh thought it 'smut'. EM Forster
called its sex scenes boring. Rebecca West called it
ugly. The NYT and the Boston Globe denounced it as
pornography.
Several major US newspapers refused to review it at
all. One editor recommended it should be 'buried under
a stone for a thousand years'. When Graham Greene
judged it among the three best books of 1955, he was
nearly driven out of town.
The problem was that Nabokov had mischievously given
Lolita a first-person character-narrator (the story is
told confessionally by its 'I', a pedophile become
convicted murderer.) That narrative form is always
latently subversive.
It also tempts the unsophisticated reader into
mistakenly identifying the narrator-character with the
author - in this case, conflating the gloomy,
beetle-browed effete, Humbert Humbert, with the
robust, gregarious and long happily-married Nabokov.
(As if any novelist would give a name like Humbert
Humbert to a character he meant us to identify with!)
(Three years ago, after this editor of the Sunday
Observer Arts Magazine published a first-person story
about a drug mule who ends up in prison, the young
author told me in scandalised disbelief how, the next
time her father attended his Lodge meeting, the
denizens of Jamaica's white-collar world crowded
around him sympathetically. How terrible he must feel,
they empathised, to have a daughter in jail in this
country!)
What was strange was that so many literary
sophisticates should have made the same elementary
mistake - especially since Nabokov had taken pains to
embed many correctives along the way. You cannot, eg,
read the following passage without loathing Humbert
Humbert - as his creator plainly means us to do at
this point:
'This was an orphan,' Humbert stresses, as,
penetrated, little Lolita 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.'
Nabokov's triumph is nonetheless to seduce the reader,
by the glory of his lyricism and the capaciousness of
his soul, to empathise with Humbert Humbert even while
abhorring him - and thus to wind up with the sobering
insight, 'There but for the grace of God go I'.
It's not just that Lolita at 12 is hardly an innocent
virgin. It's that Nabokov - quite wickedly - opposes
to her hard-boiled matter-of-factness the soaring,
plunging soul of her tormentor.
'Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?'
'Well, you haven't kissed me yet, have you?'
Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide
shoulder of road ahead and bumped and wobbled into the
weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is
only -
Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita
positively flowed into my arms....
'You mean,' she persisted, now kneeling above me, 'you
never did it when you were a kid?'
'Never,' I said quite truthfully.
'Okay,' said Lolita. 'Here is where we start.'
Whereupon Nabokov cuts from the 12-year-old's
'energetic' sexual ministrations to one of the book's
surfeit of lucent, hilarious, appalling and lyrical
climaxes (sic!). Humbert Humbert imagines what a
painting of this, his 'first time' with Lolita, would
have had to depict.
'There would have been a lake. There would have been
an arbour in flame-flower. There would have been
nature studies - a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise,
a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a
shoat.
There would have been a sultan, his face expressing
great agony (belied, as it were, by his moulding
caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a
column of onyx. There would have been those luminous
globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent
sides of jukeboxes. ...There would have been poplars,
apples, a suburban Sunday.
There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a
ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of
colour, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing
child.'
(Look at the outrageous yoking of 'luminous' and
'gonadal' - cf, 'Lolita, my sin, my soul!' - and the
glut of alliterations parodying the fake ecstasy
retailed by jukeboxes, those brand new arrivals on the
US pop culture scene. Look at the return, at the end,
from ecstasy to the flatly condemnatory reality of 'a
wincing child'.)
Lolita's verbal pyrotechnics are so dazzling, you need
to diffuse its glare by several re-readings. I read it
as a teenager, for the 'dirty parts'; then in my 20s,
when as a young writer it 'blew my mind'; then in my
30s, when it seemed the most piteously tragic book I'd
ever read (Nabokov also termed Lolita a tragedy,
remarking in its defence that 'The tragic and the
obscene exclude one another').
And then I read it again in my 40s, when its comedy
repeatedly cracked me up, and left me wondering how
I'd never seen it before. Most recently, in my
mid-50s, I read it for consolation when, newly
displaced to Jamaica, I was in the process of
'collect[ing] my scattered skeleton' (Carter); and
that reading was a pure, uncomplicated delight.
Re-reading it again in my 60s - and seeing what new
and utter mutation it has once again achieved under
the depredations of yet another passed decade - is one
of the few treats I hope still to have in store.
Nabokov conceived of Lolita as the literary descendant
of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, 'The Ballad of Annabel
Lee.' ('...She was a child and I was a child/ In this
kingdom by the sea,/ But we loved with a love that was
more than love - / I and my Annabel Lee - / With a
love that the winged seraphs of Heaven/ Coveted her
and me.')
In Poe's poem, Annabel dies of a 'chill' - sent her,
declares the bereaved narrator bitterly, by the
envious angels - and the rest of the poem is all his
defiance. 'But our love it was stronger by far than
the love/ Of those who were older than we - / Of many
far wiser than we - /And neither the angels in Heaven
above/ Nor the demons down under the sea/ Can ever
dissever my soul from the soul/ of the beautiful
Annabel Lee.'
It's the American theme, the toss of transcendent love
against death and despair, the affirmation bellowed
into the waiting void (which stops up its ears and
goes right on waiting.)
Nabokov begins Lolita by rendering Poe's children's
love in vividly physical terms. The 12-year-old girl
is (of course) named Annabel. The 12-year-old boy is
Humbert. Writes Nabokov - and relates Humbert - 'The
spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with
a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the
matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of
today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts
floating through mine. Long before we met we had had
the same dreams...
...She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of
her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster
of stars palely glowed above us...that vibrant sky
seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I
saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it
emitted a faint radiance of its own. [cf. Poe's poem:
'For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams/
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee...']
But then, as with her namesake, Annabel dies 'four
months later...of typhus in Corfu.' And now Nabokov
asked himself a novelist's question. What happens to
the boy?
Poe's boy-narrator, having identified his Annabel with
the moon and stars, is able to affirm: 'And so, all
the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling,
my darling, my life and my bride,/ In her sepulchre
there by the sea...'
But it is lyric poetry's glory to affirm the timeless
moment that lasts forever, and fiction's cross to
submit its characters and their world to Time.
And so Humbert Humbert grows up, and grows older,
until, 'during the wanderings of my adult years', he
misplaces even his lone photo of little Annabel. In
any case, it had been a poor photo: '...her thin bare
shoulders and the parting of her hair were about all
that could be identified amid the sunny blur into
which her lost loveliness graded'.
The 'sunny blur' is a kind of haze. And Lolita's name
- we are soon to learn - is Dolores Haze. (You haven't
really read this book until every other sentence
readily yields up such buried significances, the
Nabokovian jokes.)
And so (relates Humbert, now 40):
'...the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the
honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that
little girl...haunted me.until at last, 24 years
later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in
another.' Exit Annabel Lee; enter Lolita.
But Nabokov knew what Wolfe - and all the great
Americans, beginning with Twain - knew: that you can't
go home again. And so Lolita turns out to be no
Annabel, but one of those 'matter-of-fact, crude,
standard-brained youngsters of today'. And Humbert
himself has fallen a long, long way, from the
12-year-old, endearingly incoherent boy to the gloomy
and solitary nymphet-stalker: a big man fixated on
little girls.
END
--
Nicholas Laughlin
Editor
Caribbean Beat
Prospect Press
Caribbean Review of Books
MEP (Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.)
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Tel. (868) 622-3821 * Fax (868) 628-0639
info@meppublishers.com * www.meppublishers.com
----- End forwarded message -----
in the Jamaica Observer called "In Our Time". Today he
writes about the 50th anniversary of Lolita.
http://jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20050917T200000-0500_88582_OBS_REMEMBERING_LOLITA.asp
Remembering Lolita
In Our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, September 18, 2005
'She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four
feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was
Dolly in school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.
But in my arms she was always Lolita.' (Vladimir
Nabokov: Lolita)
It's mid-September, the dog days of the year, and the
great natural and manmade tragedies of the wide world
continue apace. In Iraq, the insurgency and its
carnage go right on escalating: 200 dead, 800 wounded
in Baghdad alone in the past two days.
On the US Gulf Coast and fanning out from it the
desolation endures: whole towns flattened like
matchsticks, whole populations turned into vagrants
dependent on the kindness of strangers. And with the
US Senate's confirmation hearings of John Roberts, G W
Bush's smooth-talking nominee for Chief Justice, the
process that has been turning, by swift degrees, that
once laid-back country into a frowning theocracy
advances, so smoothly you can almost hear the next cog
in that dread machine clicking into place like a key
opening a lock.
But there remains a higher realm, that of Spirit (not
to be confused with Religion). The late, great
Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov believed
that evil was spectral, and that, notwithstanding all
evidence to the contrary, the world was good.
Last week (the fourth anniversary of 9-11) was the
50th anniversary of the publication of his Lolita,
arguably the great novel of the 20th century. So let
the carnage and the desolation recede for the moment.
Evil is spectral, and the world is good. Someone
should clap hands and sing.
The seeming irony is that one should relate such a
happy assertion to the author of Lolita, which when it
appeared in 1955 caused a frenzy of denunciation in
the west, surpassing that which had got DH Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover furiously banned 30 years
earlier. Lolita was first published in Paris, then
banned in France, then un-banned and re-banned again -
all this before it first appeared in England, in 1959.
Meanwhile, high and low alike vilified Nabokov's
masterpiece as pedophilia! Edmund Wilson found it
repulsive. Evelyn Waugh thought it 'smut'. EM Forster
called its sex scenes boring. Rebecca West called it
ugly. The NYT and the Boston Globe denounced it as
pornography.
Several major US newspapers refused to review it at
all. One editor recommended it should be 'buried under
a stone for a thousand years'. When Graham Greene
judged it among the three best books of 1955, he was
nearly driven out of town.
The problem was that Nabokov had mischievously given
Lolita a first-person character-narrator (the story is
told confessionally by its 'I', a pedophile become
convicted murderer.) That narrative form is always
latently subversive.
It also tempts the unsophisticated reader into
mistakenly identifying the narrator-character with the
author - in this case, conflating the gloomy,
beetle-browed effete, Humbert Humbert, with the
robust, gregarious and long happily-married Nabokov.
(As if any novelist would give a name like Humbert
Humbert to a character he meant us to identify with!)
(Three years ago, after this editor of the Sunday
Observer Arts Magazine published a first-person story
about a drug mule who ends up in prison, the young
author told me in scandalised disbelief how, the next
time her father attended his Lodge meeting, the
denizens of Jamaica's white-collar world crowded
around him sympathetically. How terrible he must feel,
they empathised, to have a daughter in jail in this
country!)
What was strange was that so many literary
sophisticates should have made the same elementary
mistake - especially since Nabokov had taken pains to
embed many correctives along the way. You cannot, eg,
read the following passage without loathing Humbert
Humbert - as his creator plainly means us to do at
this point:
'This was an orphan,' Humbert stresses, as,
penetrated, little Lolita 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.'
Nabokov's triumph is nonetheless to seduce the reader,
by the glory of his lyricism and the capaciousness of
his soul, to empathise with Humbert Humbert even while
abhorring him - and thus to wind up with the sobering
insight, 'There but for the grace of God go I'.
It's not just that Lolita at 12 is hardly an innocent
virgin. It's that Nabokov - quite wickedly - opposes
to her hard-boiled matter-of-factness the soaring,
plunging soul of her tormentor.
'Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?'
'Well, you haven't kissed me yet, have you?'
Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide
shoulder of road ahead and bumped and wobbled into the
weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is
only -
Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita
positively flowed into my arms....
'You mean,' she persisted, now kneeling above me, 'you
never did it when you were a kid?'
'Never,' I said quite truthfully.
'Okay,' said Lolita. 'Here is where we start.'
Whereupon Nabokov cuts from the 12-year-old's
'energetic' sexual ministrations to one of the book's
surfeit of lucent, hilarious, appalling and lyrical
climaxes (sic!). Humbert Humbert imagines what a
painting of this, his 'first time' with Lolita, would
have had to depict.
'There would have been a lake. There would have been
an arbour in flame-flower. There would have been
nature studies - a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise,
a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a
shoat.
There would have been a sultan, his face expressing
great agony (belied, as it were, by his moulding
caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a
column of onyx. There would have been those luminous
globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent
sides of jukeboxes. ...There would have been poplars,
apples, a suburban Sunday.
There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a
ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of
colour, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing
child.'
(Look at the outrageous yoking of 'luminous' and
'gonadal' - cf, 'Lolita, my sin, my soul!' - and the
glut of alliterations parodying the fake ecstasy
retailed by jukeboxes, those brand new arrivals on the
US pop culture scene. Look at the return, at the end,
from ecstasy to the flatly condemnatory reality of 'a
wincing child'.)
Lolita's verbal pyrotechnics are so dazzling, you need
to diffuse its glare by several re-readings. I read it
as a teenager, for the 'dirty parts'; then in my 20s,
when as a young writer it 'blew my mind'; then in my
30s, when it seemed the most piteously tragic book I'd
ever read (Nabokov also termed Lolita a tragedy,
remarking in its defence that 'The tragic and the
obscene exclude one another').
And then I read it again in my 40s, when its comedy
repeatedly cracked me up, and left me wondering how
I'd never seen it before. Most recently, in my
mid-50s, I read it for consolation when, newly
displaced to Jamaica, I was in the process of
'collect[ing] my scattered skeleton' (Carter); and
that reading was a pure, uncomplicated delight.
Re-reading it again in my 60s - and seeing what new
and utter mutation it has once again achieved under
the depredations of yet another passed decade - is one
of the few treats I hope still to have in store.
Nabokov conceived of Lolita as the literary descendant
of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, 'The Ballad of Annabel
Lee.' ('...She was a child and I was a child/ In this
kingdom by the sea,/ But we loved with a love that was
more than love - / I and my Annabel Lee - / With a
love that the winged seraphs of Heaven/ Coveted her
and me.')
In Poe's poem, Annabel dies of a 'chill' - sent her,
declares the bereaved narrator bitterly, by the
envious angels - and the rest of the poem is all his
defiance. 'But our love it was stronger by far than
the love/ Of those who were older than we - / Of many
far wiser than we - /And neither the angels in Heaven
above/ Nor the demons down under the sea/ Can ever
dissever my soul from the soul/ of the beautiful
Annabel Lee.'
It's the American theme, the toss of transcendent love
against death and despair, the affirmation bellowed
into the waiting void (which stops up its ears and
goes right on waiting.)
Nabokov begins Lolita by rendering Poe's children's
love in vividly physical terms. The 12-year-old girl
is (of course) named Annabel. The 12-year-old boy is
Humbert. Writes Nabokov - and relates Humbert - 'The
spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with
a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the
matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of
today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts
floating through mine. Long before we met we had had
the same dreams...
...She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of
her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster
of stars palely glowed above us...that vibrant sky
seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I
saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it
emitted a faint radiance of its own. [cf. Poe's poem:
'For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams/
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee...']
But then, as with her namesake, Annabel dies 'four
months later...of typhus in Corfu.' And now Nabokov
asked himself a novelist's question. What happens to
the boy?
Poe's boy-narrator, having identified his Annabel with
the moon and stars, is able to affirm: 'And so, all
the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling,
my darling, my life and my bride,/ In her sepulchre
there by the sea...'
But it is lyric poetry's glory to affirm the timeless
moment that lasts forever, and fiction's cross to
submit its characters and their world to Time.
And so Humbert Humbert grows up, and grows older,
until, 'during the wanderings of my adult years', he
misplaces even his lone photo of little Annabel. In
any case, it had been a poor photo: '...her thin bare
shoulders and the parting of her hair were about all
that could be identified amid the sunny blur into
which her lost loveliness graded'.
The 'sunny blur' is a kind of haze. And Lolita's name
- we are soon to learn - is Dolores Haze. (You haven't
really read this book until every other sentence
readily yields up such buried significances, the
Nabokovian jokes.)
And so (relates Humbert, now 40):
'...the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the
honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that
little girl...haunted me.until at last, 24 years
later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in
another.' Exit Annabel Lee; enter Lolita.
But Nabokov knew what Wolfe - and all the great
Americans, beginning with Twain - knew: that you can't
go home again. And so Lolita turns out to be no
Annabel, but one of those 'matter-of-fact, crude,
standard-brained youngsters of today'. And Humbert
himself has fallen a long, long way, from the
12-year-old, endearingly incoherent boy to the gloomy
and solitary nymphet-stalker: a big man fixated on
little girls.
END
--
Nicholas Laughlin
Editor
Caribbean Beat
Prospect Press
Caribbean Review of Books
MEP (Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.)
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Tel. (868) 622-3821 * Fax (868) 628-0639
info@meppublishers.com * www.meppublishers.com
----- End forwarded message -----