'Lolita' - Stanley Kubrick (1962)
There are two main schools of thought on the pronunciation of the authors name. Vladimir himself pronounced his own name ‘Na-bow-cough’ whereas the general population opts for ‘Nab-oh-kov’. I myself flit from one pronunciation to the other, but i’m sure no one can deny that the author knows his own name best. But, I leave this choice firmly in your hands. Vladimir Nabokov.
I first became interested in Nabokov around six years ago. I had found the novel ‘Lolita’ in a bookstore and was instantly and irrevocably enamoured with her. One might say “it was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” I had heard of the story and I was in that bookstore with the express intention of seeking it out. On this particular edition (1997 print, Lyne, Swain) there was the young, honey-skinned and auburn haired Lo, lying on the grass of her lawn reading a magazine. I opened the novel and read the first chapter, a 173 word masterpiece. I must have read it at least three times. The beauty of Nabokov’s language and his description of the girl named “Lo-lee-ta” is something i’m sure no one can read only once. To say nothing of the content just yet, Nabokov’s prose is as lyrical and lilting as the title itself. More impressive still is that English was not even Nabokov’s native language (his native language being Russian). Despite this, each word, each phrase, each syllable melts off the tongue (...from palate to tap!) and reads less like a novel and more like poetry. When giving a lecture on Lolita in 2009, Nick Mount said, “Have you ever done something so many times that you become expert at it? You begin to add things that are inessential flourishes, something you add onto it [...] It’s the tennis player that returns the ball between her legs, it’s the soccer player who kicks the ball in the net upside-down and in mid-air. Not because he has to, but because he can. That is Nabokov’s style.” What makes Nabokov’s style his own is that he cannot resist the little flourishes, the added extras. My infatuation with Dolly would be confirmed the same day when I spotted the original film poster to Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film. Sue Lyon’s blue-grey eyes peeping over the red rims of heart-shaped sunglasses as she seductively licks on a cherry pink lollipop. Without knowing it I had become Humbert Humbert, though I was of an age where it could not be considered immoral to love Lo. I bought the book and I bought the film then and there.
‘Lolita’ was one of the most controversial novels to ever have been released. Vladimir Nabokov attained world-wide fame with it’s publication (though he had been a respected Russian writer in Europe for decades before). He began to write the novel in Russian but after several drafts began to write in English for his growing American audience. After many years of Lolita “throbbing” in him and after many close shaves (manuscript, furnace) Lolita was finally ready for publication. But who would print it? As Nabokov describes in his afterword to the novel “[One American Publisher] said that if he published the novel he and I would go to jail.” Finally the book was published in France by the Olympia Press (a publishing company that had some history of printing light erotica, a fact unknown to Nabokov at that time). Described as a strongly erotic novel by some (though others preferred to describe it as “...a novel with erotic motifs.”) it’s double entendres and dangerous theme of a middle-aged man falling helplessly in love with a twelve-year-old girl were too garish at the time of it’s publication (1955) to be ignored. The book was banned in France, the UK and other countries shortly after its publication, but never in the USA. It began to gain some notoriety after Graham Greene described it as one of the best three books of 1955. It wasn’t until a few years later that Nabokov began to see his book being consumed by American audiences. The book even made it into Groucho Mark’s stand up routine, he would say “I’m going to put off reading Lolita for 6 years. I’m waiting until she turns eighteen.” In 1958 and 1959 Lolita made the top of the USA’s fiction best-seller list (with Pat Boone’s advice to teenagers ‘Twix, Twelve and Twenty’ on the top of the non-fiction best-seller list, how delicious!). Even to this day the book is printed in it’s censored version, not because there is anything missing from the main text but because Nabokov’s afterward describing the process of Lolita is always bound to every copy. It was an essay Nabokov was encouraged to write to make readers feel better about to book, to account for it’s origin and give some defence for it’s content. Lolita is still deformed or influenced to this day by the history of censorship. Was this censorship justified? Is the book as obscene as some of it’s critics have proposed? And above all these questions, one stands out; does the subject matter highlight a deviousness in Nabokov’s own character?
Nabokov firmly and consistently denied a similarity between himself and his character Humbert Humbert, but with so many references to young girls in his work (and not only in Lolita) what conclusions is one to draw from his fascination with adolescence? Is it a purely Wildean admiration for the incomparable beauty of youth? Perhaps, Nabokov, by using Lolita and nymphets (a term he coined) to personify ageing love he communicates the idea that one cannot stay in a stage of young love perpetually and furthermore that it is in fact insane to do so. Humbert Humbert’s obsession with youth can be traced back to his childhood when, one summer, he and a girl named Annabel Lee fell “...madly, clumsily, shamelessly and agonisingly in love...” with each other. After he and his Annabel are separated by her death he continues throughout his life to try and obtain her, even after he himself grows way beyond his own childhood. Humbert is insistent that he does love Lolita throughout the whole novel and in something of a mocking laugh at the critics, in the very first chapter states that “...Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.” but who are the seraphs and what do they envy? Nabokov is writing with reference to the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Annabel Lee”. Poe writes:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she 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 wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
So the seraphs are jealous of the love of the two protagonists of this poem and perhaps Humbert sees his readers as these seraphs, jealous and unable to comprehend the love story of the book. It isn’t until page 250 that Humbert realises that a relationship with a younger girl cannot work, though his uncontrollable lust cannot subside, he decides he will no longer attempt to plunge his fangs into Lolita’s sisters. Humbert Humbert is a guilty party from page one, however. He realises his actions are wrong. Humbert describes his desires as “dangerous and degrading”. He is a self-confessed “mad-man”. He is a reluctant fiend, but a fiend none-the-less. Humbert speaks of one sided romances with nymphets on the metro and sitting alone in parks as he watches all the little girls play. Furthermore, he is repulsed by the sight of women his own age, he writes “leave me alone in my pubescent park! Let them play around me forever and never grown up!” (not to mention the relationship he has with Charlotte Haze). When writing the 1962 script to Kubrick’s ‘Lolita’ Nabokov was sure to write himself a small cameo as a butterfly hunter that runs into Humbert Humbert, thus disconnecting himself from his character once and for all. Nabokov and Humbert were truly two separate people.
Nabokov was an avid Butterfly collector. His favourite pass time was to be driven by his wife Véra (he himself never learned to drive) up to collecting sites. He was first inspired by the idea when he found books by Maria Merian in his parents attic. He was a distinguished Entomologist in his own right and apart from owning a large collection of hand-sliced Butterfly genitalia, his theory about a particular Butterfly’s evolution (though at first dismissed) was later vindicated and proven correct. He took this hobby very seriously and describes the day he discovered a new species as the happiest of his life. He wrote:
“I found it and named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and it’s first describer - and I want no other fame.”
Butterflies appear repeatedly in the work of Nabokov and perhaps this was because he was so impressed by the life of such a beautiful insect. To go from an ugly caterpillar to an immobile ‘nymph’ stage and from there emerge as a beautiful winged insect must have fascinated him greatly, but what baring did this have on his work? Perhaps the frailty and vulnerability of the ‘nymph’ stage caterpillar were traits he paralleled with young girls purposefully. What would happen should someone tamper with or corrupt this nymph in the pivotal stage of its growth? Would the resulting Butterfly be as beautiful when it emerged from it’s cocoon?
"Lola in slacks, Dolly at school, Dolores on the dotted line..." - Photos: Bert Stern
So where is the controversy in this book? I believe it to be brilliant and Vanity Fair dubbed it “...the only convincing love story of the 20th Century.” Yes, the protagonist is a twelve-year-old girl, but as Nabokov describes in his afterward, he has no moral or ulterior motive or allegory to communicate with this book. The book is fiction and to quote Oscar Wilde “There is no such thing an a moral or an immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.” I believe that the real controversy of the book is that we do not feel anger toward Humbert Humbert. The reader likes him even though he a hebephile and a murderer. This is what frightens audiences, it leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth. Not only do we feel no anger toward Humbert, we feel no sympathy for Lolita! The poor, orphaned and abused girl (at least, she does not receive our sympathies often). In the climax of the novel any glimpse of hate or loathing we had for Humbert disappears as he redeems himself. Humbert recalls his stay at Beardsley College and a conversation he overheard between Lolita and one of her classmates in which it becomes clear to him that she was jealous of her school-friends normal life and functional family unit. Humbert admits that all he offered her was an unstable and incestuous relationship. As readers we finally realise that we do not know Lolita at all (and maybe Humbert doesn’t either) because all we know about her is what Humbert says. The Lo we know, is Humbert’s version of her as she has no voice at all in the novel. Our sympathies go out to her but again are snatched back in one of the closing chapters where Humbert makes a heart-felt plea for her to come back to him “I want you to live with me and die with me and everything with me!”. The poor man! She is no longer his nymphet, she is 17 by this point and she is heavily pregnant with another mans child but even so, he still loves her madly and wants her to be with him. She refuses, “No, honey. No.” and any sympathy we had for her to that point is again snatched away from her. Sobbing and heart-broken Humbert goes back to Ramsdale to seek his vengeance on Clare Quilty, the play-write that stole Lolita away from him and the man who still has her affections. Quilty, this shadowy figure who barely appears in the book until the second-to-last chapter is the focus of the readers hate, here is the villain and next to him is our hero “The Executioner robed all in black” Humbert Humbert to exact his revenge upon him. Though, Quilty is Humbert. Quilty is an artist and hebephile, much like Humbert is (in fact, Humbert tells us how awfully similar they are. He goes so far as to tell us that he has many things in common with Quilty) but Quilty is Humbert without any form of romance or conscience about him. He abducts Lo away from Hum, and takes her back to his Mansion and he attempts to force her to take part in his pornographic movies. When Lo tells him that she wants him and only him, Quilty kicks her out and casts her aside. Lolita then reveals that after all of this she would rather be with Quilty than with Humbert. Humbert remarks, "[Lolita would say] He only broke my heart, you broke my life." Humbert then kills him.
I love Lolita, you could say I have a Humbertian obsession! The plot is divine, the characters are fascinating, the prose is poetry and no matter how many times you were to read it you would only gain a deeper understanding of Nabokov’s text. What takes me back to Lo over and over again? Nabokov takes the traditional love story and then complicates it (some might say he poisons it) but isn’t it true to say that all great love stories of the last few centuries have been about destructive love? All great love affairs appear to be tragic and oftentimes end in death (as Lolita does). Love stories that are memorable are about people who ought not be in love (Romeo and Juliet springs to mind). So, Nabokov takes these ideas of forbidden love and applies them to the 20th century and perhaps now in the 21st century ‘Lolita’ can be seen as even more relevant. I like the book because it is shocking yet touching, erotic yet decent. It is the story of a complex and immoral relationship yet somehow I as a reader sympathise with the abuser and not the abused (at least, not ‘til the very end). Humbert is a man reluctantly and uncontrollably enamoured with nymphets and the deadly demon, Lolita, time and time again toys with his emotions and uses his obsession to her own advantage. But by the end of the novel, Nabokov gets himself off the hook, so to speak. We as readers realise with Humbert what he has done to poor misguided Lo. Lolita finally gets the compassion she deserves and we realise that our sympathies should have been with her whole-heartedly from the beginning. Humbert writes, as he stands on the edge of town listening to children play, (in perhaps the most beautiful of all excerpts of the novel) “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that Concord.” This is what brings me back time and time again to the lyrical lilting loveliness of Lolita. “...and the rest is rust and stardust.”
Vladimir Nabokov 1899 - 1977
“Lolita turns 50 this year, and having stayed so perverse, it remains fresh as ever. To fully appreciate its perversity, though, one must first appreciate that it is not obscene. Your run-of-the-mill obscene masterwork—Tropic of Cancer, say—demands that you, enlightened reader, work your way past the sex and excrement to recognise how beautiful it is. But with Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognise how shocking it is.” - Stephen Metcalf
