The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Atlantic Monthly October 1995

  Nabokov’s Grand Slam

  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

  Like the sweat of lust and guilt, the sweat of death trickles through Lolita. I wonder how many readers survive the novel without realizing that its heroine is, so to speak, dead on arrival, like her child. Their brief obituaries are tucked away in the ‘editor’s’ Foreword, in nonchalant, school-newsletter form:

  ‘Mona Dahl’ is a student in Paris. ‘Rita’ has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography …

  Then, once the book begins, Humbert’s childhood love Annabel dies, at thirteen (typhus), and his first wife Valeria dies (also in childbirth), and his second wife Charlotte dies (‘a bad accident’ – though of course this death is structural), and Charlotte’s friend Jean Farlow dies at thirty-three (cancer), and Lolita’s young seducer Charlie Holmes dies (Korea), and her old seducer Quilty dies (murder: another structural exit). And then Humbert dies (coronary thrombosis). And then Lolita dies. And her daughter dies. In a sense Lolita is too great for its own good. It rushes up on the reader like a recreational drug more powerful than any yet discovered or devised. In common with its narrator, it is both irresistible and unforgivable. And yet it all works out. I shall point the way to what I take to be its livid and juddering heart – which is itself in prethrombotic turmoil, all heaves and lifts and thrills.

  Without apeing the explicatory style of Nabokov’s famous Lectures (without producing height-charts, road maps, motel bookmatches, and so on), it might still be as well to establish what actually happens in Lolita: morally. How bad is all this – on paper, anyway? Although he distances himself with customary hauteur from the world of ‘coal sheds and alleyways’, of panting maniacs and howling policemen, Humbert Humbert is without question an honest-to-God, open-and-shut sexual deviant, displaying classic ruthlessness, guile and (above all) attention to detail. He parks the car at the gates of schoolyards, for instance, and obliges Lo to fondle him as the children emerge. Sixty-five cents secures a similar caress in her classroom, while Humbert admires a platinum classmate. Fellatio prices peak at four dollars a session before Humbert brings rates down ‘drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical programme’. On the other hand he performs complimentary cunnilingus when his step-daughter is laid low by fever: ‘I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights – Venus febriculosa – though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace.’

  Humbert was evidently something of a bourgeois sadist with his first wife, Valeria. He fantasized about ‘slapping her breasts out of alignment’ or ‘putting on [his] mountain boots and taking a running kick at her rump’ but in reality confined himself to ‘twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle)’ and saying, ‘Look here, you fat fool, c’est moi qui décide.’ The weakened wrist is good: sadists know all about weakspots. Humbert strikes Lolita only once (‘a tremendous backhand cut’), during a jealous rage, otherwise making do with bribes, bullying, and three main threats – the rural fastness, the orphanage, the reformatory:

  In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analysed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?

  It is true that Humbert goes on to commit murder: he kills his rival, Clare Quilty. And despite its awful comedy, and despite Quilty’s worthlessness both as playwright and citizen, the deed is not denied its primal colorations. Quilty is Humbert’s ‘brother’, after all, his secret sharer. Don’t they have the same taste in wordplay and women? Don’t they have the same voice? ‘Drop that pistol,’ he tells Humbert: ‘Soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.’ Quilty is a heartless japer and voyeur, one of the pornographers of real life. Most readers, I think, would assent to the justice of Humbert’s last-page verdict: ‘For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment … Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.’ Quilty’s death is not tragic. Nor is Humbert’s fate. Nor is Lolita. But Lolita is tragic, in her compacted span. If tragedy explores thwarted energy and possibility, then Lolita is tragic – is flatly tragic. And the mystery remains. How did Nabokov accommodate her story to this three-hundred-page blue streak – to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?

  Literature, as has been pointed out, is not life; it is certainly not public life; there is no ‘character issue’. It may be a nice bonus to know that Nabokov was a kind man. The biographical paraphernalia tells us as much. Actually, everything he wrote tells us as much. Lolita tells us as much. But this is not a straightforward matter. Lolita is a cruel book about cruelty. It is kind in the sense that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, no matter how daunting his aspect. As a critic, Nabokov was more than averagely sensitive to literary cruelty. Those of us who toil through Cervantes, I suspect, after an initial jolt, chortlingly habituate ourselves to the ‘infinite drubbings’ meted out and sustained by the gaunt hidalgo. In his Lectures on Don Quixote, however, Nabokov can barely bring himself to contemplate the automatic ‘thumbscrew’ enormities of this ‘cruel and crude old book’:

  The author seems to plan it thus: Come with me, ungentle reader, who enjoys seeing a live dog inflated and kicked around like a soccer football; reader, who likes, of a Sunday morning, on his way to or from church, to poke his stick or direct his spittle at a poor rogue in the stocks; come … I hope you will be amused at what I have to offer.

  Nevertheless, Nabokov is the laureate of cruelty. Cruelty hardly exists elsewhere; all the Lovelaces and Osmonds turn out, on not very much closer inspection, to be mere hooligans and tyrants when compared to Humbert Humbert, to Hermann Hermann (his significant precursor) in Despair, to Rex and Margot in Laughter in the Dark, to Martha in King, Queen, Knave. Nabokov understood cruelty; he was wise to it; he knew its special intonations – as in this expert cadence from Laughter in the Dark, where, after the nicely poised ‘skilfully’, the rest of the sentence collapses into the cruel everyday:

  ‘You may kiss me,’ she sobbed, ‘but not that way, please.’ The youth shrugged his shoulders … She returned home on foot. Otto [her older brother], who had seen her go off, thumped his fist down on her neck and then kicked her skilfully, so that she fell and bruised herself against the sewing-machine.

  Now Humbert is of course very cruel to Lolita, not just in the ruthless sine qua non of her subjugation, nor yet in his sighing intention of ‘somehow’ getting rid of her when her brief optimum has elapsed, nor yet in his fastidious observation of signs of wear in his ‘frigid’ and ‘ageing mistress’, Humbert is surpassingly cruel in using Lolita for the play of his wit and the play of his prose – his prose, which sometimes resembles the ‘sweat-drenched finery’ that ‘a brute of forty’ may casually and legally shed (in both hemispheres, as a scandalized Humbert notes) before thrusting ‘himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride’. Morally the novel is all ricochet or rebound. However cruel Humbert is to Lolita, Nabokov is crueller to Humbert – finessingly cruel. We all share the narrator’s smirk when he begins the sexual-bribes chapter with the following sentence: ‘I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals.’ But when the smirk congeals we are left staring at the moral heap that Humbert has become, underneath his arched eyebro
w. Irresistible and unforgivable. It is complicated, and unreassuring. Even so, this is how it works.

  Lolita herself is such an anthology piece by now that even non-readers of the novel can close their eyes and see her on the tennis court or in the swimming pool or curled up in the car seat or the motel twin bed with her ‘ridiculous’ comics. We tend to forget that this blinding creation remains just that: a creation, and a creation of Humbert Humbert’s. We have only Humbert’s word for her. And whatever it is that is wrong with Humbert, not even his short-lived mother – ‘(picnic, lightning)’ – would claim that her son was playing with a full deck. (Actually his personal pack may comprise the full fifty-two, but it is crammed with jokers and wild cards, pipless deuces, three-eyed queens.) A reliable narrator in the strict sense, Humbert is not otherwise reliable; and let us remember that Nabokov was capable of writing entire fictions – Despair, The Eye, Pale Fire – in which the narrators have no idea what is going on at all. Lolita, I believe, has been partly isolated and distorted by its celebrity. ‘The greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction,’ states the cover of the first Penguin, which also informs us, on the back, that Humbert is English.

  Haven’t we been conditioned to feel that Lolita is sui generis, a black sheep, a bit of tasteful, indeed ‘beautiful’ erotica, and that Nabokov himself, with this particular novel, somehow got ‘carried away’? Great writers, however, never get carried away. Even pretty average writers never get carried away. People who write one novel and then go back to journalism or accountancy (‘Louder, bitch!’) – they get carried away. Lolita is more austere than rapturous, as all writing is; and I have come to see it, with increasing awe, as exactly the kind of novel that its predecessors are pointing towards. It constructs a mind in the way that a prose Browning might have gone about it, through rigorous dramatic monologue. Perhaps Lolita herself, at least to begin with, is a sadder, triter and more ordinary being than Humbert Humbert is willing or able to fix (resembling the ‘decidedly homely kid’ that her mocked mother sees). It may be that Lolita, so identified with ‘the geography of the United States’ which her story puts ‘into motion’, is to some degree an exile’s delirious invention. She is more than a figment (she is more than Don Quixote’s Dulcinea), but she is also an externalization of Humbert’s glittering quiddity.

  Humbert is a narcissist. One hesitates to explore the psychological connexions, if any, between narcissism and classical paedophilia (and Freud must have been some good, one suspects, to have bedevilled the great Nabokov so), yet both conditions are clearly regressive or anorexic, showing a reluctance to abandon the sentimentally scaled-down perfection of youth. ‘Rope-skipping, hopscotch … Ah, leave me alone,’ moans Humbert, ‘in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me for ever. Never grow up.’ Even earlier in the novel, when recalling his child love Annabel, Humbert describes a lost snapshot of their group: Annabel ‘did not come out well’ (she was bending over her chocolat glacé); ‘but I,’ enthuses Humbert,

  sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away.

  Dramatic, moody, well-tailored, looking away: now that is the grist of romance. The path of self-love is always a rocky one. But the love shared by Humbert and Humbert, for all its rough and smooth, is unquestionably the real thing.

  No narrator in literature, I think, goes on about his physical splendour as passionately and comically as the narrator of Lolita. With his ‘striking if somewhat brutal good looks’, the younger, Paris-based Humbert knows all too well that he could obtain, at the snap of his fingers, his choice of ‘the many crazed beauties’ who lash his ‘grim rock’:

  Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour. Exceptional virility often … [etc., etc.]

  When he first encounters Lolita, Humbert cruises past her in what he feels to be his ‘adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood)’. ‘I have all the characteristics’, he goes on to expound,

  which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.

  A few pages on he wonders if he might quickly avail himself of a movieland clinch: ‘A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend – too late.’ Very soon Humbert is trying on a new pair of bathing trunks before the mirror, and duly becomes (he has married the mother by now) ‘a bronzed glamour boy’ at Hourglass Lake.

  About a third of the way through the novel, with Humbert’s corny gorgeousness now massively established, Nabokov has Humbert say, with inimitable tentativeness:

  I do not know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar ‘sending’ effect that the writer’s good looks – pseudo-Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly – had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up … There may be more to it in the present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story is to be properly understood. Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert’s charm as she did to hiccuppy music …

  ‘Hiccuppy’ more than adequately summons the tonsil-swallowing vocalists of the period, those ‘throb-and-sob’ idols of a teen’s ‘dream male’ pantheon, where, as Humbert later reminds Lolita, he was once privileged to stroll. In his Afterword, when Nabokov speaks of the exhilarations of ‘philistine vulgarity’, he doesn’t just mean Lolita, or motels, or America. ‘There is no intrinsic difference between Palearctic and Nearctic manners [i.e., between Old and New worlds]. Any proletarian from Chicago can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke.’ Humbert, with his ‘pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows’, has picked his prey well, for Lo ‘it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster’. Like the poster gummed to the wall above Lo’s bed: ‘A full-page ad … It represented a dark-haired young husband … Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s face and had put, in block letters: H. H.’ The resemblance, Humbert allows, was ‘striking’. ‘First time I’ve seen a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir,’ says a ‘queerly observant’ schoolmate of Lo’s, ‘– except in movies, of course.’ No doubt the Lo–Hum story would have worked out wonderfully, in Hollywood, in dreamworld or ad-land. But this is only America, car-tool and lawn-sprinkler America, and Hum is Lo’s stepfather, and three times her age, and for two years he rapes her at least twice a day.

  Indeed Humbert’s situation is fantastically contorted and extreme. It is the central miracle of the novel that the tiny madman in his tiny cell becomes, artistically, by a series of radical shifts in context, a lord of infinite space. In bald structure, Lolita is a tale of chronic molestation – not the most liberating of narrative schemes. One can see why certain publishers wanted Nabokov to refit the novel to a setting of appropriate grimness and deracination. From the author’s Afterword:

  … one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a fanner, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong ‘realistic’ sentences (‘He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy’, etc.).

  As it happens, Nabokov finds an uncovenanted freedom in Humbert’s dark confinement, and writes
with the freshness of discovery about parenthood, marriage, jealousy, America, art and love. The angle is a tortured squint but the vistas are boundless.

  Parents and guardians of twelve-year-old girls will have noticed that their wards have a tendency to be difficult. They may take Humbert’s word for it that things are much more difficult – are in fact entirely impossible – when your twelve-year-old girl is also your twelve-year-old girlfriend. The next time you go out with your daughter, imagine you are going out with your daughter. We know that ‘limits and rules’ apply in the matter of parental caresses, that ‘girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly fluid for the senior partner to grasp’; but the ambitious molester had better learn the ropes, and quick, if his charge is not ‘to start back in revulsion and terror’. All but the childless will nod in quiet sympathy when Humbert talks of Lo’s ‘fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off – a kind of diffused clowning …’ Or how about this (aren’t they awful?):

  There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on – a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone) I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face … that look I cannot exactly describe … an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration – and every limit presupposes something beyond it …

  And, because of Nabokov’s nerve and truthfulness (and because the artistic opposite of cruelty is not kindness but vulnerability), Lolita’s innocence is never more piercingly evoked than during the fateful night at The Enchanted Hunters: when the (lightly drugged) Lo sits up in bed ‘staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara”; when she ‘frees herself from the shadow of my embrace – doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child demanding its natural rest’; or when, having been given water, ‘with an infantile gesture that carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder’.