In 1955, Vladimir
Nabokov published his most famous work, Lolita. Lolita was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language
novels from 1923 to 2005 and was fourth in the Modern Library's 1998 list of
the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.
Its reputation is vast; its influence is bigger still. What follows is an extract from my PhD where I discuss this novel and gives great insights into the creation of one of the greatest novels ever written.
Lolita
did not come to Nabokov fully formed in the mid-1950s. In 1939, he wrote a novella that remained
unpublished until 1986, following his death in 1977. That novel, entitled The Enchanter, Nabokov would go onto describe as “the first little
throb of Lolita” in an essay that
would subsequently be attached to that great novel. Like Lolita,
it is concerned with ephebophilia and the same technique of a predatory older
man to gain access to his desire as Humbert Humbert – by marrying the
mother. But the truth is greyer even
than Nabokov paints it. He touched upon
the theme earlier, in a short story written in 1926, entitled A Nursery Tale. The theme would appear
also in Laughter in the Dark [1932],
and again in one chapter of The Gift
[1938]. This concept of ephebophilia
fascinated Nabokov – and I dare say if Lolita
had been his first novel he would have been accused of being an ephebophile
himself. Lolita was a secret heart beating within him, and though it is
touched on in other works, he wrote two distinct novels on the subject – The Enchanter
and Lolita itself.
Yet he is still not done with it, or the
subject. A third, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, was published in
2009, after thirty years of family debate about whether they should release it. Nabokov had requested it be destroyed. That unfinished novella features Hubert H.
Hubert, an older man preying on a pubescent girl, but unlike in Lolita, he is rejected. What made Nabokov return again and again to
Lolita and the men that pursue her? I’m
not sure even Nabokov knew. In a BBC
interview[i] he
said,
“Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It
was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so
distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special
pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.”
Was
the desire alone to make the distant tangible to him? Was he simply imposing structure on a section
of the world he did not understand?
Whatever his reasoning, it is lost.
But we can look at how one novel evolved into something else. In 1939 he stood by The Enchanter, but later disowned it. He wrote it in Russian, and had this to say
of it long after Lolita was finished:
“Now
that my creative connection with Lolita
is broken, I have re-read [The Enchanter]
with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead
scrap during my work on Lolita. It is a beautiful piece of Russian prose,
precise and lucid.”
And
it is those things. The literary world
is glad it was not lost. Not only
because is a short masterpiece by Nabokov, haunting and disturbing in a manner
similar to his other work, but also because we can compare how a writer
matures, and alters his presentation of similar material. Here is the famous opening of Lolita:
“Lolita,
light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the
tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the
teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
God
those lines sizzle with energy! We know
straight off how proud our narrator is of this woman, whoever she is. Very quickly we learn not woman, but
child. Then we’re hit with the lines:
“You
can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
And
we gulp. We draw breath. We know this isn’t going to end well. But what’s more – here is a man, proud of
his actions. He draws pride in his
sexual attraction to a child and in the act of murder. He is a grotesque, and Nabokov shocks us
again and again with him. Through the
novel we feel our understanding of him shift, even our position of
empathy. Everything in that novel comes
from that first short chapter; the novel is an explaining of how a man can end
up there. How a man can become that.
The Enchanter,
on the other hand, sets out its stall very, very differently.
““How
can I come to terms with myself?” he thought, when he did anything at all. “This cannot be lechery. Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle
kind presupposes eventual satiation. So
what if I did have five or six normal affairs – how can one compare their
insipid randomness with my unique flame?
What is the answer?”
The
narrator is clearly locked into a similar mental turmoil to Humbert Humbert but
shares not a shred of his violence. This
man, who remains unnamed throughout, as does the girl, is stalled by fear when
his plan seems to work and gains access to the girl. His fear causes his death. The
Enchanter is a considerate work, the work of a writer finding his way into
material that is beyond his own understanding, but in comparison to Lolita it is a weaker work. Lolita
hits you, hard. No wonder it was so
instantly recognised for its brilliance.
In April 1947,
Nabokov wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson explaining the idea: "I am
writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it's going to
be called The Kingdom by the Sea....”[ii] It took him eight years to finish Lolita.
It had been eight years since The
Enchanter. Writing a novel of genius takes time, and patience. Nabokov got there brilliantly, in the end.
[i] Peter
Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall interviewed him in July
1962, for the Bookstand TV programme, in Zermatt. It was broadcast November 4, 1962. Printed as Vladimir Nabokov on his life and work in The Listener (London), 68 (1756), Nov 22, 1962, pp. 856-858.
Reprinted as "What Vladimir Nabokov
thinks of his work, his life" in Vogue,
New York, March 1, 1963, pp. 152-155.
[ii] Letter dated
April 7, 1947; in Dear Bunny, Dear
Volodya: The Nabokov Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; ISBN 0-520-22080-3), p. 215
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