The list of oblique nods to American anti-Semitism in Lolita is a long one. Lolita’s mother suspects that Humbert has “a certain strange strain” in his family and threatens to commit suicide if she ever finds out that he is not a Christian. When Humbert searches desperately in the town of Coalmont for Lolita after she has sent him a letter, he is refused admission to a store by a “wary” employee before he can even say a word. When Humbert finally tracks down Lolita’s mystery lover, Clare Quilty, at home, he is told to leave, because it is “a Gentile’s house.”28
Where his initial gestures had been too subtle in the novel, Nabokov would later underline his more opaque Semitic references. Humbert at one point in the novel feels sorry for Lolita’s classmate Irving Flashman. “Poor Irving,” Nabokov later told Lolita’s annotator. “He is the only Jew among all those Gentiles.” When an acquaintance of Humbert’s complains about the high numbers of Italian tradesmen in their small town, he adds that at least “we are still spared—.” The man’s wife, realizing where he is going, cuts him off before he can finish his sentence. But when Nabokov sat down to translate the book into Russian, he was less coy, leaving no doubt whom the townspeople are spared. The speaker clearly begins to say the word “kikes.”29
A half-dozen people in the novel have their suspicions about Humbert, but it would be more than a decade before one early commentator would name it, mentioning how others in the novel are confused about Humbert’s heritage.30 But there was another explanation, one so strange readers missed it entirely—the possibility that Nabokov intended Humbert Humbert to be Jewish.
5
On their last trip west before Lolita’s publication, Vladimir and Véra made an unscheduled stop on the way from Montana to Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, looking for a cabin to rent for the night. A landlord showed them what was available and wondered where they were from. Expressing relief that they were from upstate New York rather than the city itself, he made a comment about people who “jew” you.
Véra asked what was wrong with Jews, and their host responded that they “always try to knife you, get the better of you.” “Well, I am Jewish,” Véra replied, “and I have no intention of swindling you.” The Nabokovs left precipitously without even asking for their money back.31
No amount of notoriety or accolades was a protection from bigotry, and the prejudice to which Nabokov made Humbert Humbert testify in Lolita would continue to play out in the real world long after Nabokov had folded it into his famous, infamous book. Véra wore her identity proudly in the face of it all. Her biographer Stacy Schiff notes that when described as a Russian aristocrat in a New York Post story, Véra wrote the paper to clarify that she was “very proud” of her background, “which actually is Jewish.”32
Lolita won her author no accolades for his attention to American anti-Semitism. Lolita, in fact, won her author no prizes at all—unlike Pnin, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. But what Lolita lacked in literary awards it would make up in sales, ensuring continuous media attention for the last half of 1958 and most of the following year. The sale of film rights to James Harris and Stanley Kubrick in September 1958 for $150,000 received almost as much attention as the book itself, with people wondering how on earth it would be possible to make a movie of Lolita.33
At that point Nabokov ceased to be a merely a famous author and entered the realm of celebrity. Before winter, the paperback rights sold for $100,000, and Nabokov’s little girl was the subject of television skits by Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Arthur Godfrey. Groucho Marx had by this time already made Lolita’s acquaintance but would put off reading her “for six years, till she’s eighteen.” Lolita would go on to become one of the two bestselling novels of 1959.34
But massive sales would not sway all critics to support Lolita. Not content with having savaged it once, New York Times critic Orville Prescott would spit on its success again, noting that it proved only that “a new variety of sexual sensationalism is the surest means to literary fame and prosperity.” His fellow critic at the Times, Donald Adams, would critique it repeatedly too, in even more personal terms, as “revolting,” using a historical quote to suggest that for all his gifts, Nabokov was “utterly corrupt” and “shines and stinks like rotten mackerel in the moonlight.”35
Against all odds, critics championed another hefty novel by a Russian author that fall, as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was published in English for the first time. Pasternak’s story follows a heroic doctor who lives through the Revolution and both World Wars, trying to find love and meaning in a society that has been stripped of both. It was an arresting production from Pasternak, who started as an inventive poet much admired by Vladimir Nabokov but had chosen a very different path as a writer.
After spending nearly six months in Berlin in the early 1920s when Nabokov was living there, Pasternak had elected to return to the Soviet Union, while his parents had stayed in the West.36 His style was decidedly un-Soviet, yet Pasternak had somehow remained on good terms with Stalin.
By 1957, however, when Zhivago was complete, Stalin was no longer alive. Pasternak had submitted his work to the Soviet Writers’ Union for publication, but it was deemed insufficiently Soviet. He managed to smuggle the full manuscript to an Italian publisher, who had it translated. The book received global acclaim, and subsequent editions in language after language appeared. An English-language version popped up just in time to do battle with Lolita on the bestseller lists.37
Nabokov, however, was not a fan of Pasternak’s novel. Zhivago was a historical epic critical of the Soviet state and the dull cowardice that cripples lives, but Nabokov found it filled with nostalgia for stereotypes of the Revolution. “Compared to Pasternak,” Nabokov told a reporter, “Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.”38
As Nabokov basked in the acknowledgment that had long been his due, he could not let go of Zhivago’s success, talking Wilson’s ear off on the phone about the book’s shortcomings. Véra believed that the whole project, in fact, was a Communist plot, and that she and her husband had seen through the charade that it had somehow been “smuggled” out of Russia in the first place. People who fell for it were simply “pro-Commie” fools.39
The Nabokovs’ views might have surprised Soviet authorities, who saw the novel as a massive betrayal. They had worked tirelessly to censor Zhivago entirely, in and outside Russia. Pasternak’s “nonacceptance of the Socialist Revolution” had become a major embarrassment, but with so much publicity focused on him, it was decided that arresting him would only do more damage.40
Nabokov, however, so sure of his own interpretation, would not relent. Zhivago was so clumsy and melodramatic, he felt, perhaps it had been written by Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, widely recognized as the inspiration for the novel’s heroine.41
Ivinskaya did not, in fact, write the book, but the Soviet authorities, like Nabokov, laid it at her feet. She paid a heavy price for that attribution. While Pasternak worked on Zhivago, Ivinskaya served three years in a labor camp for her malign influence on him. After the novel’s publication, she would serve another four years.42
Though Zhivago eventually defeated Lolita on the bestseller lists, Nabokov had much to celebrate. Some people condemned him, but others had recognized his novel’s greatness. The book was going to be made into a movie. Nabokov’s future unfolded before him. What would he do next? He had staggeringly completed Lolita, Pnin, and the largest project he had ever undertaken, a translation of and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, all while remaining a professor at Cornell.
The dreaded hordes of fathers calling for the head of Professor Nabokov, author of Lolita and teacher of what had long been known as the “Dirty Lit” course, never transpired. Morris Bishop never had to make an impassioned stand for a book that he couldn’t even finish. In the midst of all the chaos, Nabokov asked for time off. One Cornell colleague speculated that he would not return, though Véra assured him that Nabokov would not leave.43
Given eno
ugh money, however, what Nabokov wanted to do was to write. In the end, his earlier anxieties that Lolita’s publication might put an end to his job were entirely correct—if not for the reasons he had feared. It soon became apparent he would give up forever classroom hours spent extolling Tolstoy’s precision and condemning Dostoyevsky for his sentimental stories of lunatics. So celebrated by then that even the October 1959 announcement of his departure from Cornell made American newspapers, Nabokov began to imagine his possible futures, as free to move and live in the world as he had been for decades in his own imagination.
6
Vladimir and Véra did not have much company on their island of resentment against Zhivago. Edmund Wilson called it “a great book” in his review for The New Yorker—and in case readers had not heard him the first time, closed by naming the novel “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.”44
With insult added to injury, Nabokov mocked Edmund Wilson’s review with vehement contrarianism: Wilson had it backward—it was not a bad translation of a good book but a good translation of a bad book. Moreover, Wilson’s essay was fat with “symbolicosocial criticism and phoney erudition.”45 Furious with his friend, Nabokov told Putnam’s never to ask Wilson to endorse any of his books again.
The growing distance from Wilson was as much about Lolita as Zhivago. Nabokov had insisted to Wilson that his Lolita was a deeply moral work, but his friend had dismissed it, had not even finished it, despite Nabokov’s entreaties, which were as close, perhaps, as the proud Nabokov would ever come to pleading with Wilson.
If Nabokov had really expected Wilson to revisit his saga of Humbert and Lolita with a careful critic’s eye and discern something others had missed, he was disappointed. Any subtleties of Humbert’s muddled history were lost in a haze of revulsion: “Nasty subjects may make fine books,” wrote Wilson, “but I don’t feel you have got away with this.”46
As reader after reader bought the book, Nabokov’s Humbert trudged on, writing a literary testament to his personal agony and ecstasy. Lolita suffered his attentions, escaped, and died millions of times across the years in dozens of languages. Folded into the background was Humbert bearing witness to anti-Semitic humiliations of post-war America: Charlotte’s lust for a German refugee maid, the motel exclusions, the kike slurs, the small-town anxiety about being overrun by Jews. As Lolita crosses the country with her middle-aged captor, Nabokov traces a shadow map with the coordinates of exclusion and bigotry. He had seen it on three continents, and knew where it could lead.
Humbert confesses early in Lolita that he comes from a racial mix, with branches of his family tree winding their way through France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and England. With his “Austrian tailor’s” fingertips, he ticks off three generations of family occupations on his father’s side: wine, jewels, and silk. The choices seem unlikely to be accidental; behind each trade stretches a long history of legal precedents and a people told where to live, kept apart, their prospects restricted by rules.47 And if the suspicions of the night clerk at The Enchanted Hunters are right, Humbert carries his family’s migration to a new level in a new world—America.
If Humbert is Jewish, he is a Wandering few for the post-Holocaust era. But in a post-Holocaust world, it may not be possible to believe in anything. Humbert notes that some sins are too extraordinary to be forgiven, yet an existence in which they do not require forgiveness seems a travesty.48
Nabokov once wrote that Humbert’s crimes were enough to damn him to eternity in hell.49 And a Jewish Humbert would appear to defy Nabokov’s monumental sympathy for Jewish suffering—in the wake of the Holocaust, the creation of a pedophile Jew seems monstrous.
Nabokov was toying with something disturbing, but the concept was not born with Lolita. The roots of “The Enchanter,” that rough draft of Lolita written in wartime France, show Nabokov already working on elements he would later polish. His original pedophile, a Central European jeweler and “traveler” in France, also initially has difficulties getting a hotel room and is suspected for the wrong reasons by the desk clerk who finally checks him in.
Nabokov is fond of trumping what we think we know about a character with new information that rattles our expectations. At one point in Lolita, Humbert notes that we assume the kind of stability in life that we get in fictional characters. King Lear will never again join his three daughters in a jolly toast. Madame Bovary will never revive from the arsenic she took.50 But Nabokov is pointing to the fact that Humbert is wrong; he has misjudged a character in the book who has just surprised him. But Nabokov, too, has made a character capable of surprising the reader in a similar way. Nabokov had learned how to tuck history into the seams of his story in such a way that it becomes visible only on a return trip. The lost, recovered history turns the original tale inside out, offering another narrative. And so Humbert first tells us a story about Lolita, and then tells us a story about ourselves.
As a young man in 1923, Nabokov had started off with Agasfer, a hackneyed version of the Wandering Jew, a character who was completely corrupt—a revolutionary, perverse, traitor seeking absolution from an unforgivable sin that had launched his grief and exile. Nabokov would utterly reject that early, inherited character, and after having fallen prey in his youth to ugly stereotypes of the tale, he would reverse the stain of the historical legend by transforming the Wandering Jew into a kind of magical sidekick in the form of the beatific, generous Silbermann in Sebastian Knight and, to a lesser degree, the equally munificent parents in “Signs and Symbols.”
Nabokov had learned to craft characters that were ever more complex, and he had returned again and again to the idea of the Wandering Jew.51 But after more than a decade of presenting holy Jewish characters to counter the venom of the Third Reich, Nabokov finally heeded his own condemnation of Dostoyevsky’s faith in suffering and humiliation as the path to moral transcendence. Suffering and humiliation, he knew, were just as likely to do irreversible damage.52
Creating a war refugee fleeing Europe, Nabokov took up the Wandering Jew story in its entirety.53 Drawing on the myths that had been used as political tools across the centuries, as well as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and hateful Nazi propaganda that further amplified and distorted the stereotype, Nabokov also included elements of the well-meant melodrama of 1920s Broadway that had tried to grapple with the Wandering Jew as a social commentator. Pulling it all together to create Humbert, Nabokov spots the reader almost every cliché of the legend: revolutionary politics, an easy income, cosmopolitan intellectualism, sexual perversion, and a truly monstrous sin—in Nabokov’s rendering, not blasphemy against Christ but the relentless, ongoing molestation of a child.
And still Humbert is human—the very thing the Nazi hatemonger Julius Streicher claimed the Jews were not during his Wandering Jew exhibition. What is more, Humbert Humbert can see American anti-Semitic hypocrisy clearly, while those around him (including, no doubt, many of Nabokov’s readers of the 1950s and 1960s) remain blind. Just as the Wandering Jew had done with his Inquisitors in the final scenes of the British productions from Nabokov’s Cambridge years, a captive Humbert Humbert directly addresses the members of his jury and admits his sin—the entire book is ostensibly his statement to those appointed to judge him. But he, too, has more testimony to give. Documenting their corruption, he denies their right to pass judgment.
In Lolita’s afterword, Nabokov names the fictional town of Gray Star, where Lolita dies, “the capital town of the book”—an odd choice, because neither Humbert nor the reader ever goes there.54 But “Gray Star,” which means nothing particular in English, is in German, a language Humbert knows, grauer star, the name for a blind spot, a cataract, that blank space in vision caused by disease that keeps someone from seeing what is plainly before him. The degree to which a reader condemns Humbert without attending to his story is the degree to which the reader’s incuriosity leads him to be judged in turn, not because Humbert is innocent or pure (he is certainly not),
but because Humbert has his own condemnation to offer.
Nabokov adds to the irony of inverting the Wandering Jew story by making the New World as obsessed as the Old—if not as violent—with ferreting out the Jews in its midst. The single-minded vigilance with which Americans try to prevent any Semitic contagion from touching their businesses or communities blinds them to the real tragedy unfolding among them—the immolation of a girl.55 In drafting Lolita, Nabokov considered naming his nymphet Juanita Dark, a play on Joan of Arc (or, as he preierred Joaneta Darc), another legend built from history in which religious piety cloaking moral blindness abets the destruction of an innocent teenager.
As surely as Humbert’s sins are his own, and unforgivable, it is also true that he has been broken by history. His suffering has not ennobled him; instead, it has driven him mad, just as historic events had destroyed Despair’s Hermann decades before, and character after character in Nabokov’s novels and short stories in between. After the death of Annabel Leigh, flight from Europe, visions of the Holocaust, and continued bigotry in America after the war, Humbert’s delusions and crimes are not only the cause of his persecution in the world; they are, in some measure, the result.56
7
Lolita has Gray Star. The cruel narrator of Pnin first meets the young Timofey with a speck of coal dust in his eye—a speck that, though removed, seems to block his ability to see Pnin clearly in the decades that follow.57
Nabokov would find himself subjected to the same impaired judgments by others. When the complete version of The Gift—Nabokov’s story of Russian literary exiles and a genius arising in their midst—was finally published in Russian in 1952, it garnered almost no attention from émigrés. But upon Lolita’s arrival in America six years later, a Russian poet placed an advertisement in a leading émigré paper denouncing writers who were traitors to their native tongue.58
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 28
