The Nymphet's Tale

...While the reader is disgusted and frightened by Humbert the pervert, he can never escape the obverse and dependent mask of Humbert the artist...

...Humbert's experiences force upon him knowledge of a core of Eden-fruit—banal as it may seem—beneath the tasteless crust of "philistine vulgarity" in America...

...It should dispose of the pretensions to leadership in American fiction of both doleful middle-aged, middle-class professionalism and rowdy subterranean howling...

...If, as Nabokov insists, Lolita is no apologue, it is here a kind of apologia: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art...

...This is the appalling moral rack upon which Lolita suspends us...

...Its subject in the clutch of almost any other contemporary American writer would turn squalid or lurid, or would be glazed with a jelly of rhetoric...

...Even Poe's "Edgar" slips into Humbert's alias when, transplanted to America, he weds a nymphet's mama—Charlotte Haze, the full-sized fruitage of young American widowhood—"for the sake of the casual caresses her mother's husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita...

...The most he can accomplish is to obliterate his bestiality by executing the thief of his Lolita, his semblable and frere...

...The parenthetical style, while reproducing the jagged motions of Humbert's unhinged mind, efficiently conveys a world of information—as, for example, the death of Humbert's mother: "(picnic, lightning...

...Though he is converted from Lolita's pervert-lover to sense in himself a blundering parenthood, he can offer her only a "parody of incest...

...And Lolita—"the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster"—must always prefer the impotent sham of Hollywood glamor, which Humbert's rival possesses, to old-world Humbert's panting needs, even to new-world Humbert's new-born fatherhood...

...Reviewed by Paul Lauter Department of English literature, Dartmouth College THE PUBLISHING HISTORY of Lolita is almost too pat to ring true...

...But this very ambivalence of humor and horror maintains the balance of sanity in Lolita...

...The actuality of Humbert's adventures is reflected by carefully subhuman correlatives...

...For Humbert, the European, delights in conceiving himself Poe's latest avatar...

...and indeed Humbert's is...

...But he can never really partake of such simplistic "values...

...In Vladimir Nabokov's companion piece to the fragment of the novel published in last year's Anchor Review, it reads indeed like a fabrication far more colossal than the book's priggish PhD "editor...

...Humbert, finally, comes to acknowledge his responsibility in this tragedy: "Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her...

...but then, neither would there have been this book...

...The wit projecting such bugs might, at first gasp, seem merely grisly and perverse...

...It focuses them more vividly in the leader's perception...

...Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter that a North-American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of mv misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art...

...But Nabokov's style has the very exactness—"cette maniere minuteuse et scientifique dont les effets sont terribles"—in rendering Humbert's sensations and desires which Baudelaire claimed for Poe's...

...but also, remotely inspiring both, that of Edgar Allan Poe...

...A whole cast of dog woofs and lopes through Nabokov's scenes...

...Emerging from such devious, subterranean passageways, Lolita shapes up more and more as the brightest novel in over a decade...

...Misses Opposite and East, cartographized neighbors...

...And, entomologist that he is, he has an entourage of flies, who inhabit a low eatery ("adman visions of celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter") or witness Humbert's final crime ("a quarter of his face was gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck...

...Lolita's greatness, however, does not depend upon theme alone...

...Hilariously and viciously misunderstood, rejected by American publishers (despite the admonitory reference to Judge Woolsey's Ulysses decision in the mock editor's fake "introduction"), Lolita found a base next to Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade on the list of a Paris publisher frequently devoted to paperback erotica...

...For it injects into our novel a style, comic and mature, whose effects may prove as vivifying as that of Ulysses...

...And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita...

...From there, it made its stealthy way through customs, esoteric reviews and coterie admiration back to American publication, if still not to American respectability...

...Thus, his attempt to have her at his side leads only to terror and pity, and to death for all involved in his perversion...

...And it reestablishes in American environs a strain of artistry which was not after all defunct, but only being cultivated these many years in Parisian gardens...

...Thus, Poe's European image hovers not only in Humbert's febrile consciousness...

...and Clare Quilty, playmaker...

...Penetrating the depths of American "culture," parodying the gun and moll mysteries, the blue-nose pornography, the psychiatric case-studies that solemnly mask as novels, Lolita brings a satirical scalpel to cut where in art as in life banality has festered...

...Yet this glass does not diffuse the book's grotesqueries in a rosy humorous glow...

...It is the Poe hero—"Pecrivain des nerfs"—whom Nabokov revives for Lolita—the sensitive, alien madman clutching beyond rationality and normal standards of behavior for an aberrant truth wherewith to feed his life, his art...

...The best he can expect is to listen, solitary on a mountain road, to the "melody of children at play" rising from a mining town, and to comprehend "that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side but the absence of her voice from that concord...

...Like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Nabokov introduces a comic glass, even at moments of greatest emotional stress, without which the reader could not but turn away from spectacles so loathsome and so tragic...

...In permitting his fatuous "editor" an innocent moment of truth, the author frames the essence of his book: "Had our demented diarist gone to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster...

...Precision within extravagance is the backbone of Lolita's technique...

...To quote an old poet: "'The moral sense in mortals is the duty "'We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.'" Herein, Lolita is most distinctively "American...

...Actually, we face a trio of laughter: that of Nabokov and his first-person hero, Humbert Humbert, certainly...

...Like Poe, he struggles to incarnate in pubescent "nymphets" his own, lost Annabelle Leigh of childhood Riviera memory...

...For the great American subject—in Poe, in Hawthorne, in Melville—has been the horror and alienation necessarily suffered and inflicted from the elixir of art...

...And the art of Lolita is more than Humbert's solace...

...The sting in this tale, and the laughs, are surely on us—but that is just what we should have expected...

...In this technique lies, I think, Lolita's future importance...

...After Charlotte's automobile death, when Humbert launches a cross-country concubinage with his girl-child Lolita, they tour through a Baudelairean image of Poe's America—"Une grande barbarie eclairee au gaz...

...Nabokov's names, for example, embody in glorious hyperbole physical or psychic relations of people and places to Humbert: Ramsdale and Beardsley, prim New England towns...

...And, in a second nightmare journey, Humbert loses his Lolita to an enigmatic and perverse rival in a Poesque world of hallucination, disease and mystery...