by Martin Amis
Similarly, every father feels a pang when his daughter begins to take a healthy interest in the opposite sex. But how much more incandescent the pain (this is Freud made real) when the daughter’s suitors are the father’s rivals. Again there is great comic veracity in the horror and fastidiousness with which Humbert views the repulsive galère of Lolita’s admirers: ‘goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools’, ‘golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhoea’, ‘odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweat-shirts and an ember-red cheek pressing against hers’ – indeed every variety of gangling, reeking adolescent, ‘from the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands” thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car’. (Acne is everywhere: even a truck sports its ‘backside carbuncles’.) And when the rival is Quilty, an adult, a ‘brother’ (who physically resembles a cousin of Humbert’s), and when the admiration is requited by the ‘vile and beloved slut’, then the prose congests with a lyrical disgust; the disgust is authentic, because it is ultimately self-directed. At the swimming pool:
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little moustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his navel pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigour where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood.
A husband, too, can on occasion find his wife a little wearing, particularly if she is a self-constructed simulacrum of the perfect American homemaker (all poise and how-to), and even more particularly if he is planning to drug and rape her twelve-year-old child. Humbert married his first wife, Valeria (the ‘animated merkin’, the ‘brainless baba’), as ‘a piteous compromise’: what attracted him was ‘the imitation she gave of a little girl’. He marries Charlotte out of the coldest expediency; and what follows, in these implacably talented early pages, is a vicious parody of marital cheer: Charlotte beautifies the lovenest and pores over Your Home Is You, while Humbert handsomely glowers and gloats, with ‘a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile’. With his feelings quite unengaged (‘My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love’), Humbert is free to celebrate ‘the coarse pink skin of her neck’, or the way the wings of her nose shine ‘having shed or burned up their ration of powder’, or the ‘tasteless reveries’ in which she predicts that the soul of the child she lost (another dead child) would return ‘in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock’. With Valeria, Humbert managed to perform sexually by having her dress up in a girl’s plain nightshirt (‘I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise’). With Charlotte he relies on good liquor, ‘two or three kinds of vitamins’ and ‘the richest foods available’, and also contrives to engage her in Lolita’s bedroom, where he experiences ‘some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensate[s] her by a fantastic display of old-world endearments’. Thereafter, in the fifty days of their cohabitation, it is genetic consonance that alone sustains him:
So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.
Even by locally prevailing standards Charlotte is egregiously traduced in Lolita. Poor Charlotte: rigid, religious, snobbish and formidable, an exponent of the fake candour that eternally precludes the real thing (not that Humbert has much use for candour). The novel kills her off, of course, yet she survives as a character; and her resilience is the resilience of young America. Nabokov has scoffed at the notion, but the descent of Humbert Humbert, a boho among bohunks, with his intricate ironies and lusts, on the fruit vert of America is in some sense a paedophiliac visitation. Like Lolita, America is above all young, ‘with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess’. With unsurpassed sharpness of eye and ear Nabokov captures the rhythms of the American road. But for Humbert the circumambient ‘wilds’ represent a humiliation and, again, a travesty; their openness and freedom are a continual reproach to his own furtiveness and ignoble constraint. Admire this supreme modulation, in which the swiftness of disdain gradually slows in the heavier water of anxiety:
Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.
Or here, where Humbert allows himself the dejected clarity of hindsight:
And so we rolled East … We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tyres, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.
It has often been suggested that the ‘morality’ of Lolita is not inherent but something tacked on at the end, like the last scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which a swarthy psychiatrist is produced to explain in neat jargon the very different depravities in a very different motel. As if, after a 260-page debauch (Nabokov having been ‘carried away’), the author sobered up, gave his phallus a brisk downward chop with the side of his hand, and started tricking out his denouement with a few face-saving spiritual mottoes. Humbert on the hillside begging forgiveness of Lolita and the American landscape, Humbert paying his last call on the plain and pregnant Mrs Richard F. Schiller (where, we should note, his cruelty is indiluted: ‘leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole …’), Humbert’s last memories of Lolita as the entirely ordinary little girl she kept on being, throughout everything: these scenes are justly famous (they can still make the present reader shed tears as hot as Humbert’s), and even the dissenting critic will allow them a certain emotional power. But we are not moved by artful editorials. We are moved by the ending of Lolita, by its finality and justice, because – perhaps only subliminally – we have seen it all coming. Even today, after two of Lolita’s lifespans, people are still wandering up to Dmitri Nabokov and asking him what it was like, having a dirty old man for a father. Even sophisticated readers still think that Nabokov had something to feel guilty about. Great novels are shocking; and then, after the shock dies down, you get aftershocks.
The presiding image of Lolita, so often missed by the first-time reader (I know I missed it, years ago), is adumbrated in its Foreword: Lolita in childbed, dead, with her dead daughter. Let us see what forms and colorations Nabokov gives to this stark silhouette. In Paris, when Humbert is confining himself to visiting prostitutes ‘whose mere youth warranted [his] catching some appalling disease’, he contacts a specialist qui pourrait arranger la chose, and, the next day,
an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provençal accent and a black moustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.
Those last five wo
rds may be swamped by the bounty of their predecessors; but they exactly answer to ‘the dreadful grimace of clenched teeth tenderness’ which, on the previous page, Humbert sees in an accusing mirror while dallying with another small whore in another ‘small Eden’. Such are the travesties of familial feeling (‘almost farcical’, ‘theatrically’), among ‘very young harlots disguised as children’. Images of deformity, of half-aliveness, of cruel displacements in mortal time, give Lolita a glow no less numb and waxy than its heroine’s corpse.
For the novel is shot through with these bald dolls and wizened mannequins – with the old made young and the young made old. On the eve of the seduction, the ‘lethal’ delectation, Humbert writes: ‘I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita – the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture.’ The next morning, as he prepares to leave the hotel:
I was forced to devote a dangerous amount of time … to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores. Then I finished dressing and had the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.
On the next page Lolita is both an ‘immortal daemon disguised as a female child’ and ‘the small ghost of somebody I had just killed’. In death Charlotte is a doll, a ‘doll-like wee career girl’, diagrammatized (this is very American) by the man who ran her over. Shopping for Lo, on his way to camp to claim her, Humbert is surrounded by ‘lifesize plastic figures of snubbed-nose children with dun-coloured, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces’. These figures reappear, mutilated, in a later storefront, just before Lolita finally takes off: ‘wigless and armless … On the floor … there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blonde wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.’ All these pathetic fragments and progeriac transpositions will be hideously jumbled, under an Alp-weight of pain, in the dreams Humbert has when Lo is gone:
she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres gamies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
In his Afterword Nabokov explains that the first ‘shiver’ of Lolita was inspired by a newspaper story about an ape, ‘who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage’. Inspiration needn’t be very apposite; but the appositeness of this ‘first little throb’ has perhaps been misemphasized. It’s not so much that Lolita has been encaged and enslaved, though she has been. Humbert’s crime is to force her out of nature – to force a child through the hoops of womanhood, insulting and degrading her childish essence. Nabokov says that the initial impulse had ‘no textual connection’ with the fiction that followed, but in fact there are at least a couple of backward glances. Valeria, soon to die in childbirth, spends some of her last days imitating an animal, on a diet of bananas and dates, as part of a paid ethnological experiment. And on his travels Humbert visits a zoo ‘where a large troop of monkeys lived on [a?] concrete replica of Christopher Columbus’ flagship’, and thus spend their lives mutely symbolizing America. Lolita is ‘trained’ (i.e., pampered and terrorized); she subsists on apples and sugarlumps given in exchange for her animal repertoire. Only once is she specifically imagined in this way; it is one of those moments of extraordinary expansion, where Nabokov’s prose streaks off like a tracer bullet in a dark sky. The sexual act has taken place on a hilltop:
I remember that the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms – a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! … and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and beautiful children … [followed by] a stout lady with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestone children … With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the trainer!), I made Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car … and with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me in a language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.
Shockable Humbert, who finds bad language so ‘disgusting’. I shudder to think how his ghost, attired in its ghostly smoking-jacket, would round on me for calling him a vulgarian and a philistine. Actually he is of a more dangerous and rarer breed (though one very fully represented in Nabokov’s corpus): such people, because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art. Humbert is the artist manqué. To see the magic of nymphets ‘you have to be an artist and a madman’, claims Humbert early on (‘oh, how you have to cringe and hide!’). Wangling yet more powerful sleeping pills from the family doctor (on which to gorge the limp nymphet), he comes away with violet-blue capsules ‘intended not for neurotics whom a glass of water would calm … but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries’. The weeping Humbert sheds above-average teardrops, ‘hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed’. He is ‘her Catullus’, he is ‘poor Catullus’: ‘The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets – not crime’s stamping ground.’ This is all blasphemous flannel, naturally. Who but Hum could refer to the gauged postponement of his orgasm (on the sofa, with a still innocent Lo) as ‘a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts’? ‘Emphatically, no killers are we,’ Humbert pleads: ‘Poets never kill.’ But this one does. Before he pulls the trigger he recites a poem: a parody – under the circumstances, a travesty – of ‘Ash-Wednesday’. And Nabokov never had much time for Eliot.
Necessarily uncensorious himself (a neighbour is a ‘retired executioner or writer of religious tracts – who cared?’), Humbert Humbert, all his life, has longed for great disasters, explosions, earthquakes, situations where ‘nothing really mattered’, where ‘nothing mattered any more, and everything was allowed’ (‘A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game!’). In art, in a sense, nothing really matters; no one gets hurt; it is only a game. But an artistic reckoning must be completed, and, in Nabokov, art itself provides the reproach and the punishment. His manqué figures pay a steep price for their presumption, for their monkeying around with the order of things: Albinus in Laughter in the Dark, with his plan to cartoonify the Old Masters; Kinbote in Pale Fire, with his epic and vandalously solipsist misreading of John Shade’s poem; Hermann Hermann, another autist, in Despair, with his doomed crime and his doomed novel. Inasmuch as Lolita is Humbert’s creation, then he is partly redeemed, leaving us this book which has ‘bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies’. Those flies: we think, rather, of their ‘horribly experienced’ brethren, ‘zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour’ in some foul diner, in some dismal ex-prairie state. Not all the book comes from Humbert’s pen. He isn’t responsible for the F
oreword, where we learn of Lolita’s death, in childbed. Humbert’s sin is biological, a sin against the ordinary. He has made ordinary biology impossible: marriage, childbirth, a daughter, ordinary happiness, ordinary health, in ‘Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest’ and ‘the capital town of the book’, as Nabokov notes. It may or may not surprise Humbert to learn that the book he has written is not a love story but a travesty.
What makes human beings laugh? Not just gaiety or irony. That laughter banishes seriousness is a misconception often made by the humourless – and by that far greater multitude, the hard of laughing, the humorously impaired or under-gifted. Human beings laugh, if you notice, to express relief, exasperation, stoicism, hysteria, embarrassment, disgust and cruelty. Lolita is perhaps the funniest novel in the language because it allows laughter its full complexity and range. We hear its characteristic edge when Humbert uses his ‘pet’ for the play of his wit and his prose: this is the laughter we hear (not too often, I hope) when we recognize the outright perfection of our moral sordor. ‘Sordid’ is a word largely conspicuous by its absence in Humbert’s tale. Its one self-directed appearance, I think, comes (in brackets) at The Enchanted Hunters, when he concedes that the sleeping-pill business is ‘a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit’. The mock-genteel French tag is an important constituent of Humbert’s corrosive mask. And there is a feeling of all laughter spent when, reluctantly admiring the shapely hands of Richard F. Schiller (Mr Lo), Humbert writes:
