not coincidental that so many of Nabokov’s heroes are doomed and so many of his novels are cast in the form of posthumous autobiographies. His subjects are nothing less than mutability and time, Eros and Death, the twin subjects of all real muse poetry.
Like so many Nabokovian narrators, Humbert Humbert is a man obsessed with an irretrievable past. When he refinds his nymphet in Ramsdale (even the place names in Lolita are full of sexual innuendo), he recognizes at once that he has discovered the reincarnated essence of his Riviera puppy love, who perished of typhus decades earlier:
It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely in-drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
Time is what Humbert seeks to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Nabokov has caught the essence of obsession no less than Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. Obsession has a life of its own: The object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.
The obsession of Humbert with Lolita has been compared to many things: the obsession of the artist with the creative process, the obsession of the butterfly collector with his specimen, the obsession of the exile with retrieving a lost homeland (a characteristic Nabokovian theme). It is all these things, and more. And yet the book works, finally, because it is the story of a man maddened by an impossible love, the impossible love for an impossible object: a banal little girl who calls him “kiddo.” Aren’t all impossible, obsessional loves inexplicable to other people? Do our friends ever understand? Isn’t that inexplicability the wonder and the terror of obsessional loves?
In looking for the “sources” of Lolita, we have to look no further than Nabokov’s genius, but it is useful to remember that he translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, and that Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is one of the seminal books in his life, as it is in the life of so many other Russian writers. As D. M. Thomas said of Pushkin, “The sexual and creative instincts in him ran as parallel as the twin blades of a skater.” The same surely can be said of Nabokov, and nowhere is this clearer than in Lolita.
The publishing history of Lolita is almost as Nabokovian as any of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations; it seems almost a case of life imitating art. Nabokov finished Lolita in the spring of 1954 and “at once began casting around for a publisher.” Since Lolita is thirty this year—or at least her first American trade edition is—we should try to remember the state of American publishing in 1954, when I myself was in nymphage.
In those benighted days, it was impossible to obtain a copy of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure outside the rare-book room of a university library or a private erotica dealer. Believe me, I tried. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover could not be purchased at your local bookstore. The raciest sex manual available to the panting adolescent was Love Without Fear by Eustace Chesser, M.D. And A Stone for Danny
Like so many Nabokovian narrators, Humbert Humbert is a man obsessed with an irretrievable past. When he refinds his nymphet in Ramsdale (even the place names in Lolita are full of sexual innuendo), he recognizes at once that he has discovered the reincarnated essence of his Riviera puppy love, who perished of typhus decades earlier:
It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely in-drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
Time is what Humbert seeks to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Nabokov has caught the essence of obsession no less than Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. Obsession has a life of its own: The object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.
The obsession of Humbert with Lolita has been compared to many things: the obsession of the artist with the creative process, the obsession of the butterfly collector with his specimen, the obsession of the exile with retrieving a lost homeland (a characteristic Nabokovian theme). It is all these things, and more. And yet the book works, finally, because it is the story of a man maddened by an impossible love, the impossible love for an impossible object: a banal little girl who calls him “kiddo.” Aren’t all impossible, obsessional loves inexplicable to other people? Do our friends ever understand? Isn’t that inexplicability the wonder and the terror of obsessional loves?
In looking for the “sources” of Lolita, we have to look no further than Nabokov’s genius, but it is useful to remember that he translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, and that Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is one of the seminal books in his life, as it is in the life of so many other Russian writers. As D. M. Thomas said of Pushkin, “The sexual and creative instincts in him ran as parallel as the twin blades of a skater.” The same surely can be said of Nabokov, and nowhere is this clearer than in Lolita.
The publishing history of Lolita is almost as Nabokovian as any of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations; it seems almost a case of life imitating art. Nabokov finished Lolita in the spring of 1954 and “at once began casting around for a publisher.” Since Lolita is thirty this year—or at least her first American trade edition is—we should try to remember the state of American publishing in 1954, when I myself was in nymphage.
In those benighted days, it was impossible to obtain a copy of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure outside the rare-book room of a university library or a private erotica dealer. Believe me, I tried. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover could not be purchased at your local bookstore. The raciest sex manual available to the panting adolescent was Love Without Fear by Eustace Chesser, M.D. And A Stone for Danny
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