Books: To the End of Night

LOLITA (319 pp.)—Vladimir Nabokov —Putnam ($5).

Early during World War II, one of the most remarkable writers ever to emigrate to the U.S. arrived in New York from France. Vladimir Nabokov was a stateless Russian. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who earlier at the same port said he had nothing to declare but his genius, Nabokov declared a set of boxing gloves. Two customs inspectors each donned a pair, sparred a friendly round and chalked everything O.K. But it was Nabokov who really won that round, for he smuggled into the country a greater and more scandalous talent than Wilde’s.

Nabokov’s intellectual luggage included fragments of a book that later, published in Paris in 1955, became a must item of the contraband spice trade in which Henry Miller’s Tropics have bulked large. Now. after several years of subterranean fame, Lolita has finally found a U.S. publisher. Following Nabokov’s earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift—which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night.

Lolita is a major work of fiction; it is also a shocking book. Prefaced by a fictitious academic fathead who presents it as a message to “parents, social workers, [and] educators,” the book describes the transcontinental debauch of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged monomaniac. As it turns out, the narrator is writing his apologia from a prison cell (he is to be tried for murder). As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny. It is (in many of its pages) a Medusa’s head with trick paper snakes, and its punning comedy as well as its dark poetics will disappoint the smut hounds—a solemn breed.

Kingdom by the Sea. The novel’s European narrator calls himself Humbert Humbert and the doubletalk name sets the note of self-mockery that runs—laughter questioning the validity even of despair—throughout the book. Humbert’s ignominious, fatal obsession is for little girls in the 9-14 bracket—not ordinary little girls but a special kind he calls “nymphets.” As Humbert explains it in a passage that is typical of his style: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

Humbert’s obsession began in a dreamily distant beach resort where he met and desperately loved a girl—both being unlucky 13. Since Humbert is given to puckish literary references, the girl’s name, of course, was Annabel Leigh (Poe spelled it Lee). After Humbert’s early love is interrupted by shame and death, he incessantly searches for a return to that lost, childish kingdom by the sea. He searches through the mail order catalogues of Paris whoredom, through a low-comedy marriage, through Central Park—until he finally finds Annabel’s reincarnation in Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. She is his culture-vulture landlady’s daughter in a small New England town where Humbert has holed up to do some literary work. The girl is just a gum-chewing, Coke-filled, comic-book-educated sub-teen-ager —but she is Humbert’s fatal love.

The Final Farce. Humbert marries Lolita’s mother in order to be near the child. The mother, through Humbert’s diaries, discovers his true predilections, runs distraught out of the house and is killed by a car. Now begins the prodigiously clumsy business of Humbert’s trying to seduce his own stepdaughter—the fumbling, phony-paternal tenderness, the elaborate scheming, the agony of longing which Author Nabokov manages to make at once ludicrous, terrible and utterly convincing. But in the end, as Humbert tells the event, “it was she who seduced me . . . Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved [her].”

Having finished a parody of decent domesticity, “Hum” and “Lo” embark on a parody of incest that takes them across the continent. They restlessly traverse the neon-lit landscape of filling stations, diners, small towns, automobiles and asphalt —the motel tundras where, if one pays, checks out by noon and turns in the key, one can voyage to the end of night.

Along Humbert’s and Lolita’s way, there are scenes of horrible irony. CHILDREN UNDER 14 FREE, says a sign at one hotel. But the most truly horrible part of the book is the intimate fashion in which the reader is made to see how from a monstrous relationship a kind of shadow of a good life emerges. Humbert, the false father, often becomes a truly tender pseudo parent; Lolita, the perverted child, becomes a true innocent. In the end—to Humbert’s great agony—she is pregnant and happy with a young, goonlike husband. She has escaped, but there is no escape for Humbert. He seeks out a rich, pansy-type writer who had casually seduced her earlier, and in a horrific scene of violence and farce, shoots him.

In the School Bus. If farce keeps rattling through the story, the reason is that Author Nabokov himself is an irrepressibly witty man who can see tragedy through laughter as clearly as he can see life’s darkest side from its calmest vantage point. Nabokov teaches European literature at Cornell, is also a dedicated lepidopterist who has discovered about a dozen new species and subspecies. He disclaims all but a writer’s interest in nymphets. To get sub-teen patter right, he took rides in a school bus. He obviously also learned much about roadside America. Says he: “I love motels. I would like to have a chain of motels—made of marble.. I would put one every ten minutes along the highway, and I would travel from one to another with my butterfly net.”

Nabokov is resigned to the idea that Lolita will be attacked on moral grounds, but he humorously questions the moral standards of at least some U.S. publishers. One firm, he notes, offered to publish the book three years ago if he turned Lolita from a girl into a boy—homosexuality presumably being much more acceptable than nymphet-mania.

Silence in the Street. Some critics will reach for their nearest Dostoevsky, but Nabokov himself disdains comparison with the other Russian, whom he regards as a clumsy and vulgar writer. Yet, the suppressed criminal episode in Dostoevsky’s’ The Possessed invites analogy with Lolita. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky’s moral monster, seduced an innocent. The difference is that Stavrogin told of his crime to prove he was capable of it; Nabokov’s character tells his agonized story to show that he was incapable of not committing it. In Nabokov’s world, crime is its own punishment, and the possessed are not possessed by devils but by themselves.

In the last passages of Lolita, as Humbert waits for the police, he comes to understand the true nature of his crime. He recalls how, on a dark hillside, he heard from below a “vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute . . . divinely enigmatic . . . 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.” Thus it was when James Joyce’s hero Stephen stood in the school study listening to the voices of boys at play. “That is God,” said Stephen, “a shout in the street.” Nabokov also seems to be asserting that all of creation is God, and that Humbert, listening in vain for the laughter of a child, knew it at the bitter end.