Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  During the Civil War, when James was discovering his own powers, he wrote in part to compensate for his inability to participate in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he complained about the impotence of words in the face of such inhumanity. In an interview on March 21, 1915, with The New York Times, he said: “The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”

  Despite his despair, he turned to words again, this time to write not fiction but war pamphlets, appeals to America to join the war and not to remain indifferent to the suffering and atrocities in Europe. He also wrote poignant letters. In some he expressed his horror at events; in others he consoled friends who had lost a son or a husband in the war.

  He fell into a round of activities, visiting wounded Belgian soldiers, and later British soldiers, in hospitals, raising money for Belgian refugees and the wounded and writing war propaganda from the fall of 1914 until December 1915. He also accepted the post of honorary head of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps and joined the Chelsea Fund for Belgian refugees. All these were whirlwind activities for a shy and reclusive writer whose most ardent pursuits and passions had previously been reserved for his fiction. As his biographer Leon Edel would later say: “. . . the world seemed to find too much comfort in him and he had to often protect himself against its weeping too profusely on his shoulders.” While visiting the hospitals, James likened himself to Whitman visiting the wounded during the Civil War. He said it made him feel less “finished and doddering when I go on certain days and try to pull the conversational cart uphill for them.” What inner horror and fascination drove this man, who all his life had shied away from public activity, to become so actively involved in the war effort?

  One reason for his involvement was the carnage, the death of so many young men, and the dislocation and destruction. While he mourned the mutilation of existence, he had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind. In September, James moved to London. “I can hear and see and have informational contact,” he wrote; “I eat my heart out alone.” He lobbied the U.S. ambassador to Britain and other high American officials and reproached them for their neutrality. And he wrote pamphlets in defense of Britain and her allies.

  James emphasized in his many letters one important resource to counter the senselessness of the war. He was aware, as many were not, of the toll such cruelty takes on emotions and of the resistance to compassion that such events engender. In fact, this insensitivity becomes a way of survival. As in his novels, he insisted on the most important of all human attributes—feeling—and railed against “the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel.”

  Years later, on a pink index card I carried across the oceans from Tehran to Washington, D.C., I found two quotations about James’s wartime experiences. I had written them out for Nassrin, but I never showed them to her. The first was from a letter he wrote to Clare Sheridan, a friend whose husband—they were newly married—had gone to war and been killed. “I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel,” he wrote, “because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.” In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living.

  One of the peculiarities of James’s reaction to the war was the fact that his feelings and emotions were not aroused for patriotic reasons. His own country, America, was not at war. Britain, the country where he had lived for forty years, was, but in all those forty years he had not asked for British citizenship. Now, he finally did. In June 1915, a few months before his death, Henry James was granted British nationality. He had written to his nephew Harry that he wished to make his civil status compatible with his moral and material status. “Hadn’t it been for the War, I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing; but the circumstances are utterly altered now.”

  His more immediate reason for this sudden reversal was that, because of wartime conditions, he had been categorized as a “friendly alien” and needed police permission every time he traveled from London to his home in Sussex. But the more important and symbolic reason was his disenchantment with America’s distance from the war. He wrote to a friend, Lilly Perry, that “the immediate presence of the Enemy transforms it from head to foot when one’s own nationality does nothing for one that keeps pace with transformation.”

  The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination. “Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers,” he wrote to his old friend Rhoda Broughton, “and I am sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that these long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst became possible.” He had written to Edith Wharton of “this crash of civilization. The only gleam in the blackness, to me, is the action and the absolute unanimity of this country.” James’s idea of home was bound up with the idea of civilization. In Sussex, during the war, he had found it difficult to read and impossible to work. He described himself as living under “the funeral spell of our murdered civilization.”

  When, in September 1914, the Germans attacked and destroyed the Rheims cathedral in France, James wrote: “But no words fill the abyss of it—nor touch it, nor relieve one’s heart, nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one’s heart and the anguish of one’s execution aren’t mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetuated against the mind of man.”

  All his life had been a struggle for power—not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.” Yet in the face of so much carnage and destruction he felt helpless and impotent. His affinity with England, and with Europe in general, came from that sense of civilization, a tradition of culture and humaneness. But now he had also seen Europe’s depravity, its fatigue with its own past, its predatory, cynical nature. It is no wonder he used all his powers, not least the power of words, to help those he believed to be in the right. He was not insensitive to their curative potential, and wrote to a friend, Lucy Clifford, “We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.”

  24

  A few days after my talk with Nassrin, I found two girls standing outside my office just before class. One was Nassrin, with her usual pale smile. The other was dressed in a black chador that covered her from head to foot. After staring at this apparition for a while, I suddenly recognized my old student Mahtab.

  For a second all three of us stood there, frozen in place. Nassrin seemed almost detached; detachment had become her defense against unpleasant memories and uncontrollable realities. It took me a few moments to digest this new Mahtab, to make a shift in my mind and transform that Mahtab, the leftist student in her trademark khaki pants whom I had last seen on the grounds of a hospital hunting for her murdered comrades, to this Mahtab, standing with a rueful smile and begging recognition outside my office. I made an uncertain gesture as if to e
mbrace her, but then checked myself and asked her how she had been all these years. Only then did I remember to invite them into my office. I had very little time before my next class.

  Mahtab had kept in touch with Nassrin, and when she’d heard I was teaching again at Allameh, she’d plucked up the courage to come and visit. Could she attend my class? And then perhaps after class, if I had time, if it wasn’t a problem, she could tell me a little about herself. Of course, I said, she should absolutely come to class.

  During the two hours of my lecture on James’s Washington Square, my eyes often strayed to Mahtab in her black chador, sitting very straight, listening with a sort of alert nervousness I had never seen in her before. After class she followed me to my office, with Nassrin trailing in after her. I asked them to sit down and offered them some tea, which they both refused. Ignoring their refusal, I left to order tea and came back and closed the door, to ensure our privacy. Mahtab sat on the edge of a chair, while Nassrin stood beside her staring at the opposite wall. I told Nassrin to take a seat because she was making me nervous and turned to Mahtab and asked her, in as casual a tone as I could muster, what she had been doing all these years.

  She looked at me at first with docile resignation, as if she had not understood my question. Then she fiddled with her fingers, half hidden under the folds of her chador, and said, Well, I have been where Nassrin was. Shortly after the day I saw you at the demonstrations, I was arrested. They gave me only five years, which was lucky—they knew I was no big shot in our organization. And then I was let off early. I got out after two and a half years, for good behavior. She left me to guess what good behavior meant to the kind of people who had put her in jail. There was a knock at the door, and Mr. Latif entered with the tea. We all paused until he had left the room.

  I did think of you and of our classes, she said after he had left. After the initial interrogations, she had been assigned to a cell with fifteen others. There, she had met another student of mine, Razieh. Balancing the small cup of tea I had offered her in one hand, without letting her chador slip, she said, “Razieh told me about your classes on Hemingway and James at Alzahrah, and I told her about the Gatsby trial. We laughed a lot. You know, she was executed. I was lucky, she said. Less than a year after she was released from prison, Mahtab had married and had a baby; she was expecting another one. Three months pregnant. It doesn’t show from under the chador, she said, pointing shyly to her stomach.

  There was nothing I could ask her about my murdered student. I did not want to know how they had lived in their cell, what other memories they had shared. I felt that if she told me, I might do something foolish and would not make it to my afternoon class. I asked her about her baby’s age but not about her husband. Could I ask her my favorite question: Did you two fall in love? I had heard about so many girls who had married soon after their release from jail, married because they could appease the suspicions of their jailers, who somehow thought of marriage as an antidote to political activities, or to prove to their parents that they were “good” girls now, or simply because there was nothing else for them to do.

  “You know, I always thought Gatsby was so beautiful,” Mahtab told me as she was getting up to go. “And the scene you read to us about that day when Daisy meets Gatsby again for the first time in five years, her face wet under the rain. And the other scene, when she tells him he looks so cool and she means to say that she loves him. We had fun at Gatsby’s trial, you know?” Yes, I knew. The fact that they remembered Gatsby and even remembered having fun with him would have been gratifying under different circumstances, but then, I was thinking among other thoughts, how the joy of reading Gatsby would now be forever marred by being linked in my memory with Mahtab’s time in jail and Razieh’s execution.

  I felt I had to open the window, to let the air in after they were gone. From my office I could see the yard, where snow almost caressed the trees. There was a heaviness Mahtab had left behind, a tangible atmosphere of pain and resignation. Was she the lucky one, the one who was released and got married to some guy, the one who reported to the prison guards every month, the one with a hometown in ruins and a two-year-old child? She was lucky and Razieh was dead. Nassrin had also called herself lucky; my students had developed a strange concept of fortune.

  The other quotation from James on the pink index card records his reaction to the death of Rupert Brooke, the beautiful young English poet who died of blood poisoning during the war. “I confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection,” he wrote, “no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes.”

  Next to the last words, I added at some later point in pencil: Razieh.

  25

  What strange places my students met, from what dark corners did they bring me news! I could not travel, I cannot travel even now to those places, no matter how many times I hear about them. Yet there must have been something cheerful about Razieh and Mahtab in their cell, not knowing if they will live or die, talking about James and Fitzgerald. Perhaps cheerful is not the right word. I mention this because it is not where I had imagined they would take my favorite novels, my golden emissaries from that other world. I think of Razieh in that jail, and of Razieh facing the firing squad on some night, perhaps the same night I was reading The Long Goodbye or The Bostonians.

  I remember now, as I did then, that one of the most surprising things about Razieh was her love of James. I remember the class I taught at Alzahrah University and all its frustrations. The distinguishing feature of this so-called university was that it was the only all-girls college in Iran. It had a small campus with a beautiful and leafy garden and I taught two courses there while also teaching at the University of Tehran, in the first year after my return. I was shocked when, grading the midterm exams, I noticed that most of the class, rather than respond to the questions, had simply repeated my classroom lectures. In four cases this repetition was amazing. They had transcribed seemingly word for word what I had said about A Farewell to Arms, including my “you know”s and my digressions about Hemingway’s personal life. Reading these exam papers, I felt I had been given a bizarre parody of my own lectures.

  I thought they had cheated; it was inconceivable to me that they could have re-created my lectures so precisely without notes. My colleagues, however, informed me that this was regular practice: the students memorized everything their teachers said and gave it back to them without changing a word.

  At the next class after that exam, I was furious. It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were expected and understood. I remember I told them it would have been better if they had cheated—at least cheating required a certain ingenuity—but to repeat my lecture word for word, to include not so much as a glimmer of themselves in their response . . . I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.

  They were all silent, even those who had not committed the sins I had attributed to them. I dismissed the class early, although the culprits and a few others stayed behind to plead their case. They were docile even in their pleas: they wanted to be forgiven, they did not know any better, this was what most professors expected. Two were in tears. What could they do? They had never learned any better. From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing.

  Razieh stayed until they had all left. Then she told me she wanted to talk to me. “It isn’t their fault,” she said. “I mean, it is in a way, but I always thought you were one of those who cared.” The echo of reproach in her voice startled me. Would I have been so angry if I didn’t care? “Yes, that is the easy way,” she said quie
tly. “But you must think about where we are coming from. Most of these girls have never had anyone praise them for anything. They have never been told that they are any good or that they should think independently. Now you come in and confront them, accusing them of betraying principles they have never been taught to value. You should’ve known better.”

  There she was, this small girl, my student, lecturing me. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, but somehow she managed to look authoritative without being impertinent. They love this class, she said. They even learned to love Catherine Sloper, though she isn’t pretty and lacks everything they look for in a heroine. I said, In these revolutionary times it’s hardly surprising that students wouldn’t care much about the trials and tribulations of a plain, rich American girl at the end of the nineteenth century. But she protested vehemently. In these revolutionary times, she said, they care even more. I don’t know why people who are better off always think that those less fortunate than themselves don’t want to have the good things—that they don’t want to listen to good music, eat good food or read Henry James.

  She was a slight girl, slight and dark. Her seriousness must have been a burden to her fragile frame. Even so, she was not frail; how a person this fragile looking could give an impression of such solidity I do not know. Razieh. I don’t remember her last name, but her first name I can use without having to worry about security, because she is dead. It seems ironic that I should only be able to use the real names of dead people. She had the respect of her classmates and, in those deeply ideological times, was listened to by girls from both ideological extremes. She was an active member of the Mujahideen, but this didn’t keep her from being suspicious of their cant. She had no father, and her mother earned her living as a cleaning woman. Both Razieh and her mother were deeply religious, and it was her religious belief that attracted her to the Mujahideen: she felt contempt for the Islamists who had usurped power.