…I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me…
Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn’t faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov’s fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is a ruthless flirt). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate” as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.*
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Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not “a novel in fragments,” as the cover states; it is immediately recognizable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling—“bycycle,” “stomack,” “suprize”), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I daresay, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. “Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city”: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our “abject physicality”:
I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it—the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet…
Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.
Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, makes even the most well-attuned reader feel uncomfortable, seeming to impose authorial condemnation on you for being so prissy, literal-minded, and vulgar. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (i.e., as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H. Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a preteen’s bed), we do notice the twenty-four-year-old vamp with twelve-year-old breasts (“pale squinty nipples and firm form”), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love (“her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit”). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoliation of very young girls.
Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.
The word we want is not the legalistic pedophilia, which in any case deceitfully translates as “fondness for children.” The word we want is nympholepsy, which doesn’t quite mean what you think it does. It means “frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable,” and is rightly labeled by my Concise Oxford English Dictionary as “literary.” Nympholepsy is therefore a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. “Nabokov’s is really an amorous style,” John Updike lucidly observed: “It yearns to clasp diaphanous exactitude into its hairy arms.” With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology—“from Gk numpholeptos ‘caught by nymphs,’ on the pattern of EPILEPSY”; “from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein ‘seize, attack.’ ”
Dreamed up in 1930s Berlin (with Hitler’s voice spluttering out from the rooftop loudspeakers), and written in Paris (post-Kristallnacht, at the start of the Nabokovs’ nerve-racking flight from Europe), The Enchanter is a vicious triumph, brilliantly and almost osmotically translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, ten years after his father’s death. As a narrative it is logistically identical to the first half of Lolita: the rapist will marry—and perhaps murder—the mother, and then attend to the child. Unlike the redoubtable Charlotte Haze (“she of the noble nipple and massive thigh”), the nameless widow in The Enchanter is already promisingly frail, her large body warped out of symmetry by hospitalizations and surgeons’ knives. And this is why her suitor reluctantly rejects the idea of poison: “Besides, they’ll inevitably open her up, out of sheer habit.”
The wedding takes place, and so does the wedding night: “and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver)” would be physically unable to tackle “those multiple caverns” and “the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis.” But “in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine,” things take an unexpected turn,
so that, after the fact, it was with astonishment that he discovered the corpse of the miraculously vanquished giantess and gazed at the moiré girdle that almost totally concealed her scar.
Soon the mother is dead for real, and the enchanter is alone with his twelve-year-old. “The lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap.”
In Lolita, Humbert has “strenuous sexual intercourse” with his nymphet at least twice a day for two years. In The Enchanter there is a single delectation—noninvasive, voyeuristic, masturbatory. In the hotel room the drugged girl is asleep, and naked; “he began passing his magic wand above her body,” measuring her “with an enchanted yardstick.” She awakes, she looks at “his rearing nudity,” and she screams. With his obsession now reduced to a cooling smear on the raincoat he throws on, our enchanter runs out into the street, seeking to rid himself, by any means, of a world “already-looked-at” and “no-longer-needed.” A tramcar grinds into sight, and under
this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment—that’s it, drag me under, tear at my frailty—I’m traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face…don’t rip me to pieces—you’re shredding me, I’ve had enough….Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectogram of a thunderbolt’s split seconds—and the film of life had burst.
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In moral terms The Enchanter is sulfurously direct. Lolita, by contrast, is delicately cumulative; but in its judgment of Humbert’s abomination it is, if anything, the more severe. To establish this it is necessary to adduce only two key points. First, the fate of its tragic heroine. No unprepared reader could be expected to notice that Lolita meets a terrible end on page 2 of the novel that bears her name: “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in childbed,” says the “editor” in his Foreword, “giving birth to a still-born girl…in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest”; and the novel is almost over by the time Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (i.e., Lo) briefly appears. Thus we note, with a parenthetical gasp, the size of Nabokov’s gamble on greatness. “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book,” he had announced (at the lectern), “one can only reread it.” Nabokov knew that Lolita would be reread, and re-reread. He knew that we would eventually absorb Lolita’s fate—her stolen childhood, her stolen womanhood. Gray Star, he wrote, is “the capital town of the book.” The shifting qualification—gray star, silent lightning, torpid smoke, pale fire, and, yes, even hot filth: this is the Nabokovian countertone.
The second fundamental point is the description of a recurring dream that shadows Humbert after Lolita has flown (she absconds
with the cynically carnal Quilty). It is also proof of the fact that style, that prose itself, can control morality. Who would want to do something that gave them dreams like these?
…she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte [his ex-wives], 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 misplaced, in horrible chambres garnies, 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-a-brac, pity, impotence, and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
That final phrase, with its clear allusion, reminds us of the painful diffidence with which Nabokov wrote about the century’s terminal crime. His father, the distinguished liberal statesman (whom Trotsky loathed), was shot dead by a fascist thug in Berlin; and Nabokov’s homosexual brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp (“What a joy you are well, alive, in good spirits,” Nabokov wrote to his sister, Elena, from the US to the USSR, in November 1945. “Poor, poor Seryozha…!”). Nabokov’s wife, Véra, was Jewish, and so, therefore, was their son (born in 1934); and there is a strong likelihood that if the Nabokovs had failed to escape from France when they did (in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht seventy miles from Paris), they would have joined the scores of thousands of the racially impure delivered by Vichy to the Reich.
In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once—in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing. Take, for example, this one-sentence demonstration of genius from the insanely inspired six-page short story of 1948, “Signs and Symbols” (it is a description of a Jewish matriarch):
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Pnin goes further. At an émigré house party in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin Mira, and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her “terrible end.” “Indeed, I have,” Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:
What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira’s image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself…never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because…the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind…but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.
How resonantly this passage chimes with Primo Levi’s crucial observation that we cannot, we must not, “understand what happened.” Because to “understand” it would be to “contain” it. “What happened” was “nonhuman,” or “counterhuman,” and remains incomprehensible to human beings.
By linking Humbert Humbert’s crime to the Shoah, and to “those whom the wind of death has scattered” (Paul Celan), Nabokov pushes out to the very limits of the moral universe. Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact, and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession—tumultuously announced, in 1969, by the arrival of Ada. When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.
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I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada (or Ardor: A Family Chronicle). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: “But this is dead,” I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader’s response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At six hundred pages, two or three times Nabokov’s usual fighting weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call “a burster.” It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.
When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect—or with “terror-stricken praise,” in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, “formless and dull,” “a cold pudding of a book,” “a tragic failure,” and “a frightful bore.” Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov (and with others), we see a decisive loss of love for the reader—a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, “correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays.
There is a weakness in Nabokov for “patricianism,” as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former’s purely “Russian” novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don’t walk, they “march” or “stride”; they don’t eat and drink, they “munch” and “gulp”; they don’t laugh, they “roar.” They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heartthrobs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.
In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is twelve; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half sibling) is fourteen. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their “strenuous trysts.” On top of this, there is a running quasi fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as eleven can be “fondled and fouled.” And Van’s sixty-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is ten. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.
In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does “work out” and “measure up”—the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgie
s. What both novels signally lack, though, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can’t hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien—a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts, a world where “nothing matters” and “everything is allowed.”
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This leaves us with Transparent Things (to which we will uneasily return) and Look at the Harlequins!—as well as the more or less negligible volume under review. “LATH!,” as the author called it, just as he called The Original of Laura “TOOL,” is the Nabokov swansong. It has some wonderful rumbles, and glimmers of unearthly color, but it is hard of hearing and rheumy-eyed; and the little-girl theme is by now hardly more than a logo—part of the Nabokovian furniture, like mirrors, doubles, chess, butterflies. There is a visit to a motel called Lolita Lodge; there is a brief impersonation of Dumbert Dumbert. More centrally, the narrator, Vadim Vadimovich, suddenly finds himself in sole charge of his seldom-seen daughter, Bel, who, inexorably, is twelve years old (they are always twelve years old).
Now, where does this thread lead?
…I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses—a few hot drops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff—my relations with her remained essentially innocent.
Well, the dismaying answer is that this thread leads nowhere. The only repercussion, thematic or otherwise, is that Vadim ends up marrying one of Bel’s classmates, who is forty-three years his junior. And that is all.