I know that I read Lolita sometime during my senior year in college, which was the last year of the socially-constricted Eisenhower presidency. Nabokov was a celebrity at Cornell and I remember attending a lecture in which he delivered a hilarious destruction of Soviet realism. He was the first novelist whom I ever saw with my own eyes (I had sat next to Tom Pynchon in a course in Eighteenth-Century English literature every day for a semester, but although Pynchon had published a story or two in Epoch, he was just another gangley guy and hardly the artist--or the enigma--that he would soon become).
Lolita had been published in Paris in 1955, so it's just a bit more than fifty years old, and therefore halfway to its centennial, when, it's often asserted, it becomes possible to distinguish between works for the moment and works for the ages. An interim report: Lolita is doing very very well. It's as impressive now as it was then -- but for different reasons. When I read the novel In 1959, I was dazzled by its verbal surface: the allusions to Poe, to Hamlet, to Joyce (whose Ulysses I had read closely even then). Of course I missed much, especially because at that time I had read almost no continental literature. But I loved being able to decipher some of the novel's playful mysteries: that, for example, "Vivian Darkbloom" -- who is Clare Quilty's accomplice in crime -- was an anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov" and that Lolita's teachers "Miss Horn" and "Miss Cole" spoonerized an obscenity. It pleased me immensely that Charlotte Haze ordered a mattress from "a firm located at 4640 Roosevelt Blvd., Philadelphia," because I had spent three dreadful summers working in the Sears Roebuck warehouse on Utica Avenue, where I might have composed an Anatomy of Boredom. I knew to whom "Brown, Dolores" alluded, and I knew why she squatted outside the gates of the cloister. And then there were Nabokov's extraordinary rhetorical displays. Had there ever been a novelist who cared enough to write a sentence like "the least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose," where "least" balanced "loose," "paradise" balanced "pressure," and "set" offset "suffice?"
I loved Lolita and I read all that I could find of Nabokov's early works and then all the new ones as they appeared. But it's been a long time since I last read the novel and the sexual abuse of children is no longer, if it ever was, a matter for flippancy. I was worried that Lolita would be insensitive and dated. But it's not so. It's still satirical, and it's still fun, but now it's less comic than it is sad. Humbert is still clever, but he's clearly a madman, and the murder of Quilty is the best apology that he can render to Lolita. Humbert knows he's the blackest of villains, that he's robbed Lolita of her childhood, that he lived in "a world of total evil," and that "even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which... was all I could offer the waif." The novel shocked Eisenhower America because it was thought to be lurid -- but it's no more lurid than Oedipus. It's fully, designedly, and beautifully tragic.
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