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As some of you may know, the cover illustration for a
volume of essays I edited, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Oxford
UP, 2003), is a reproduction of a fetching painting by Balthus, Les
Beaux Jours, depicting an adolescent girl suggestively
sprawled on a couch (actually a velvet chaise longue), gazing at her
reflection in a mirror while, behind her, a man rather ominously
kneels on a hearth, stoking a fiercely burning fire. I recently came
across a passage in the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning's memoir, Birthday
(San Francisco: Lapis, 1986), in which she mentions the arrival of
Lolita on the Paris literary scene and notes the indignant
reaction it drew from a painter who sounds suspiciously like Balthus.
The passage reads as follows: "Once a painter whose
avowed turf was little girls spat like a cat at the mention of
Nabokov's Lolita, new on the Paris literary scene. 'I hated
that book. I hated it. He has no right. Only a highborn
artist should be allowed to handle that subject.'"
The unnamed
painter's snobbish assumption that Lolita's author was not
"highborn" appears doubly ironic in the context of Tanning's remarks.
She has just noted the propensity of some artists to dream up a "gilded
past" for themselves, along with an inflated notion of their
"preeminence in the present." The unnamed painter serves as her example
of this type.
Ellen Pifer