Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  Daisy’s night at the Colosseum is fatal to her in more ways than one: she catches the Roman fever that night from which she will die. But her death is almost predetermined by Winterbourne’s reaction. He has just declared his indifference, and when she returns to the carriage to leave, he recommends that she take her pills against Roman fever. “ ‘I don’t care,’ said Daisy, in a strange little tone, ‘whether I have Roman fever or not.’ ” We all agreed in class that, symbolically, the young man’s attitude towards Daisy determines her fate. He is the only one whose good opinion she desires. She is constantly asking him what he thinks about her actions. Without ever telling him, she poignantly and defiantly desires that he prove his devotion to her not by preaching, but by approving of her as she is, without any preconditions. It is ironic that ultimately Daisy is the one who really cares, and proves her devotion by dying.

  Winterbourne was not the only one to feel relief on discovering the answer to Daisy’s riddle. Many of my students shared his relief. Miss Ruhi asked why the novel did not end with Daisy’s death. Did that not seem the best place to stop? Daisy’s death seemed like a nice ending for all parties concerned. Mr. Ghomi could gloat over the fact that she had paid for her sins with her life, and most others in the class could now sympathize with her without any feeling of guilt.

  But this is not the end. The novel ends just as it started, not with Daisy but with Winterbourne. At the beginning of the story, his aunt warned him that he was in danger of making a grave mistake about Daisy. She had meant that he could be duped by her. Now, after Daisy’s death, Winterbourne ironically reminds his aunt, “ ‘You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.’ ” He had underestimated Daisy.

  At the beginning of the novel, the narrator tells us of a rumor that Winterbourne is attached to a foreign woman. The novel ends, bringing us around full circle, with this same statement: “Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is ‘studying’ hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady.”

  The reader, who has identified with the hero until that moment, is left out in the cold. We are left to believe that Daisy, like the flower she is named after, is a beautiful and brief interruption. But this conclusion also is not wholly true. The narrator’s tone at the end leads us to doubt if Winterbourne could ever see life the way he saw it before. Nothing will really be the same again, either for Winterbourne or for the unsuspecting reader—as I had occasion to find out much later, when my former students went back to their “mistakes” about Daisy in their writings and conversations.

  17

  In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce “art as a human complication and social stumbling block,” my friend Mina reminded me. This is what made James so difficult. Mina was a scholar of James and I had told her about my students’ difficulties with Daisy Miller. Mina added, a little anxiously, I hope you are not thinking of dropping him because he is too difficult. I assured her that I had no such intention; anyway, it was not that he was too difficult for them, it was that he made them uncomfortable.

  I told her my problem was not so much students like Ghomi, who were themselves so bluntly opposed to ambiguity, but my other students, who were victims of Ghomi’s unambiguous attitude towards them. You see, I have a feeling that people like Ghomi always attack, because they are afraid of what they don’t understand. What they say is we don’t need James, but what they really mean is we are afraid of this fellow James—he baffles us, he confuses us, he makes us a little uneasy.

  Mina told me that when she wanted to explain the concept of ambiguity in the novel, she always used her chair trick. In the next session I started the class by picking up a chair and placing it in front of me. What do you see? I asked the class. A chair. Then I placed the chair upside down. Now what do you see? Still a chair. Then I straightened the chair and asked a few students to stand in different places around the room, and asked both those standing and those sitting to describe the same chair. You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?

  In order to encourage the silent majority in my classes to openly discuss their ideas, I asked my students to write their impressions of the works we were reading in diary form in a notebook. In their diaries, they were free to write about other matters related to the class or their experiences, but writing about the works was mandatory. Miss Ruhi always described the plot, which at least demonstrated that she had read the books I had assigned, and that she even, in some cases, had not only read them but also read about them. But she seldom expressed her own opinions. In one instance she mentioned that she had objected to Wuthering Heights’s immorality until she read somewhere about its mystical aspects, but in James’s case there seemed to be no mysticism involved—he was very earthy, if at times too idealistic.

  Her notebooks were always neat. At the top of each assignment she wrote in beautiful handwriting: “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” She wrote that Daisy was not merely immoral, she was “unreasonable.” Yet it was good to know that even in a decadent society like America there were still some norms, some standards according to which people were judged. She also quoted another teacher, lamenting the fact that certain writers made their unreasonable and immoral characters so attractive that readers instinctively sympathized with them. She lamented the fact that the right-thinking Mrs. Costello or Mrs. Walker was cast in such a negative light. This to her demonstrated a writer’s satanic as well as godly powers. A writer like James, according to her, was like Satan: he had infinite powers, but he used them to do evil, to create sympathy for a sinner like Daisy and distaste for more virtuous people like Mrs. Walker. Miss Ruhi had imbibed the same dregs as Mr. Nyazi and so many others.

  Mr. Ghomi was true to his role. He rarely showed any indication of having read the novels. He ranted and raved about immorality and evil. He got into the habit of “educating” me by writing quotations from Imam Khomeini and other worthies about the duty of literature, about the decadence of the West, about Salman Rushdie. He also took to pasting in his notebook newspaper clippings reporting murder and corruption in the United States. One week he got so desperate that he resorted to quoting the slogans posted out in the streets. One such slogan I particularly liked: A WOMAN IN A VEIL IS PROTECTED LIKE A PEARL IN AN OYSTER SHELL. This slogan, when it appeared, was usually accompanied by a drawing of a predatory half-open oyster shell revealing a glossy pearl inside.

  Mr. Nahvi, his silent older friend, wrote neat philosophical treatises on the dangers of doubt and uncertainty. He asked whether the uncertainty James made such a fuss over was not the reason for Western civilization’s downfall. Like many others, Mr. Nahvi took certain things for granted, among them the decay of the West. He talked and wrote as if this downfall were a fact that even Western infidels did not protest. Every once in a while he handed his notes in, along with a pamphlet or a book on “Literature and Commitment,” “The Concept of Islamic Literature” or some such.

  Years later, when Mahshid and Mitra were in my Thursday class and we returned to Daisy Miller, they both lamented their own silence back then. Mitra confessed that she envied Daisy’s courage. It was so strange and poignant to hear them talk about Daisy as if they had erred in regard to a real person—a friend or a relative.

  One day, leaving class, I saw Mrs. Rezvan walking back to her office. She approached me and said, “I keep hearing interesting reports about your classes”—she did have reporters in every nook and cranny. “I hope you believe me now when I tell about the need to put something into thes
e kids’ heads. The revolution has emptied their heads of any form or thought, and our own intelligentsia, the cream of the crop, is no better.”

  I told her I was still not convinced that the best way of going about this was through the universities. I thought perhaps we could address it better through a united front with intellectuals outside the university. She gave me a sidelong glance and said, Yes, you could do that as well, but what makes you think you will have more success? After all, our intellectual elite has not acted any better than the clerics. Haven’t you heard about the conversation between Mr. Davaii, our foremost novelist, and the translator of Daisy Miller? One day they were introduced. The novelist says, Your name is familiar—aren’t you the translator of Henry Miller? No, Daisy Miller. Right, didn’t James Joyce write that? No. Henry James. Oh yes, of course, Henry James. By the way what’s Henry James doing nowadays? He’s dead—been dead since 1916.

  18

  I told my magician that I could best describe my friend Mina with a phrase Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James’s The Ambassadors, uses to describe himself to his “soul mate,” Maria Gostrey. He tells her, “I’m a perfectly equipped failure.” A perfectly equipped failure? he asked. Yes, and you know how she responds?

  “Thank goodness you’re a failure—it’s why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you—look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour? Look, moreover,” she continued, “at me.”

  For a little accordingly their eyes met. “I see,” Strether returned. “You too are out of it.”

  “The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of youth! But our realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”

  I told him, One day I will write an essay called “Perfectly Equipped Failures.” It will be about their importance in works of fiction, especially modern fiction. I think of this particular brand as semi-tragic—sometimes comic and sometimes pathetic, or both. Don Quixote comes to mind, but this character is essentially modern, born and created at a time when failure itself was obliquely celebrated. Let us see, Pnin is one, and Herzog, and Gatsby perhaps, but perhaps not—he does not choose failure, after all. Most of James’s and Bellow’s favorite characters belong to this category. These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards. James, I believe, felt that in many ways he was one, with his misunderstood novels and his tenacity in keeping to the kind of fiction he felt was right, and so is my friend Mina, and your friend Reza, and of course you are one, most definitely, but you are not fictional, or are you? And he said, Well, right now I seem to be a figment of your imagination.

  I believe I had picked Mina as a perfectly equipped failure when I first met her after the revolution, during one of my last department meetings at the University of Tehran. I was late and as I entered the room I saw, sitting opposite the door, to the right of the department head, a woman dressed in black. Her eyes and short, thick hair were also jet-black, and she appeared indifferent to the hostile arguments flying around her. She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time. This is what I remember about her: a shabby gentility, an air of “better days” clinging to all she wore. From that very first glance to our last meeting many years later, I was always oppressed by two sets of emotions when I met her: intense respect and sorrow. There was a sense of fatalism about her, about what she had accepted as her lot, that I could not bear.

  Farideh and Dr. A had talked a great deal about Mina—her knowledge, her commitment to literature and to her work. There was a generosity to Farideh, which, despite her dogged commitment to what she called revolution, opened her up to certain people even when they were ideological opponents. She had an instinct for picking out the rebels, the genuine ones who, like Dr. A or Mina or Laleh, disagreed with her political principles. So it was that she instinctively sympathized with Mina and tried to console her, although she disagreed with her on almost all counts.

  Mina had been recalled from a two-year sabbatical at Boston University, where she’d gone to write her book. She was given an ultimatum, and she, in my opinion, had made a mistake in returning to Iran. Her book was on Henry James. She had studied under Leon Edel, and when I first saw her, it was difficult for her, quite an effort, to utter the simplest sentence. She of course never taught again: she came back to be expelled. She refused to wear the veil or to compromise; her only compromise had been to return. And maybe that was not a compromise but a necessity.

  Mina’s father had been the poet laureate—her family was cultured and well-off. Our families had gone on weekend outings together when we were young. She was older than me and never really talked to me during these family gatherings, but I remembered her vaguely. She is in some of the old photographs from my childhood, standing behind her father in their garden, with one of her uncles and my father and a young man I cannot identify. She looks solemn, with the shadow of a conditional smile.

  Farideh and I tried to tell Mina how much we appreciated her, how outraged we were that the university did not. She listened impassively but seemed to enjoy our esteem. Her favorite brother, the president of a large company, had been arrested at the start of the revolution. Unlike most, he refused to put up with the new regime. Although he was not politically active, he supported the monarchy and like his sister he spoke his mind, even in jail. He had been insolent and that was enough. He was executed. Mina nowadays always dressed in black. Almost all her time in those days seemed to be devoted to her brother’s widow and children.

  Mina lived alone with her mother in a ridiculously large mansion. The day Farideh and I went to visit her, each carrying a large bouquet of flowers, was a sunny day clipped short as soon as we entered the mausoleum of her front hall. Her mother opened the door. She knew my parents and spent some time talking to me about them and then abruptly but politely left us as soon as her daughter descended the winding staircase. We were standing at the bottom of the steps with our colorful bouquets and pastel dresses, looking too breezy and light in the face of the somber gravity of that house, which seemed to pull all things into its shadows.

  Mina’s joys, the way she expressed her appreciation, were solemn. Yet she was very happy to see us and she led us into the huge semicircle of her living room. The room seemed to have complaints of its own, like a widow appearing for the first time in public without her husband. It was sparsely furnished; there were empty spaces where there should have been chairs, tables and a piano.

  Mina’s mother, a dignified woman in her late sixties, served us tea on a silver tray, with dainty glass teacups in silver filigree containers. Her mother was a wonderful cook, so going to her house was always a feast. But it was a mournful feast, because no amount of good food could bring cheer to that deserted mansion. Our hostesses’ gracious hospitality, their efforts to make us feel welcomed, only made their well-concealed loss more emphatic.

  Realism in fiction was Mina’s obsession, and James her passion. What she knew, she knew thoroughly. We complemented each other, because my knowledge was impulsive and untidy, and hers meticulous and absolute. We could talk for hours on end. Before Farideh went into hiding and then joined her revolutionary group, escaping to Kurdistan and then to Sweden, the three of us used to talk about fiction and politics for hours, sometimes deep into the night.

  Farideh and Mina were polar opposites when it came to politics—one was a dedicated Marxist and the other a determined monarchist. What they shared was their unconditional hatred for the present regime. When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries, like Far
ideh, or hermits, like Mina and my magician. They withdrew and simmered in their dashed dreams. For what good could Mina be without her James?

  19

  The air attacks on Tehran were resumed after a long period of calm in the late winter and early spring of 1988. I cannot think of those months and of the 168 missile attacks on Tehran without thinking of the spring, of its peculiar gentleness. It was a Saturday when Iraq hit the Tehran oil refinery. The news triggered the old fears and anxieties that had been lurking for over a year, since the last bombs had hit the city. The Iranian government responded with an attack on Baghdad, and on Monday, Iraq started its first round of missile attacks on Tehran. The intensity of what followed transformed that event into a symbol of all that I had experienced over the past nine years, like a perfect poem.

  Soon after the first attacks, we decided to stick adhesive tape to our windows. We moved the children first to our own room, covering the windows in addition with thick blankets and shawls, and then, later, into the tiny windowless hall outside our bedrooms, the scene of my sleepless assignations with James and Nabokov. A few times we thought seriously of leaving Tehran, and once, in a frenzy, cleaned a small room that was later turned into my office near the garage, fortifying its windows; then we moved back up to sleep in our own bedrooms. I, who had been most frightened during the first round of attacks on Tehran, now seemed the calmest, as if to compensate for my former behavior.