This is the fourth letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. New York: Vintage International, 1997 [1955].
Realistically, even great writers and artists typically start their careers kissing money goodbye.
As an emigrant in Europe, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov was already an established novelist, but all his books were published in tiny editions, and the publishing royalties were only enough to fund his butterfly catching expeditions. Nabokov made ends meet giving tennis lessons, English and Russian lessons, and as a movie extra of all things.
That all changed with Lolita (1955). Lolita was a best-seller and it threw its author and all of his previous books into the limelight. No more subletting professors’ houses while they were on sabbatical.
Needless to say, Lolita is one of the weirdest modern books ever. It’s a story of unbridled lechery and pedophilia that pretends to be a love story — and everybody seems to go along with it.
There are a lot of philistines on two ends of a spectrum: those who decry this novel as evil and amoral, and anyone who reads or enjoys it is walking filth; and then there are people who say it is an erotic story, and that this Humbert guy really was seduced by a girl named Dolores (“love and roses”). Both sides are lazy, and only engage with half of this text’s project.
For the “relationship” at the center of this narrative is a kind of test. There are people who go out on a limb and say “well, did Humber really rape Lolita, if she initiated and all that?” They are leaning on their training as aesthetic critics, turning on their “disinterest” — but in this case, we’re taking up the logic of the narrator, who, like Edgar Allen Poe’s anti-heroes, are obsessed with clearing their names, rationalizing their actions, and portraying themselves as the real victim at all times.
On the other side are people who blow past the linguistic performance and the metafictionality at play in this book. They go straight to the “content” of this non-existent being named Dolores Haze. Either way, people are getting seduced!
It’s especially wild for Lolita to be so incompletely understood and misrepresented. The book practically begins to explain itself on page one!
The first bit of Lolita is not “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” That’s the beginning of Humbert Humbert’s testament, but that whole text is framed by an italicized preface by a certain Dr. John Ray. His introduction stages the whole problem, a “beautiful” form relating such ugly events: which is the situation of modern art.
I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. […] A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
(It now strikes me how the English H looks like the Russian N (Н), N for Nabokov?!)
The contrived nature of both the cast and the setting of Lolita might be betrayed by how Humbert is in the book a young guy, in his late twenties, but in Stanley Kubrick’s film — and in our popular imaginations — he is a middle-aged looking James Mason. On the page H.H. is the young rake type, like Tolstoy’s Dolokhov. But the rhetorical performance and the mentality it articulates simply belongs too much much to an “old soul.”
Another thing that strikes me about Lolita on this third reading: it’s not even really that “erotic,” except maybe chapters subletting in the Haze household, but that’s only a small part of the narrative. And even at that, it reads as an exaggerated, satirical version of suburban America, like in a porno. It raises the suspicion that many people talking about Lolita may have not even made it that far in the book.
The artificial character of the narrative comes from Humbert’s need to camouflage his crimes and the other people involved, hence the proliferation of odd names — including Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for the author’s name. H.H. is a compulsive metafictionist, generating more and more possible and parallel worlds:
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
This language of “boundless alternatives” and forking paths suggests the very formal movement of Nabokov’s novel: the delight taken in doppelgangers, codenames, whimsical detective plots — what Fredric Jameson once described, half-unsympathetically, as “the euphoria of substitutions.”
Humbert’s linguistic faculty is seducing the reader as much as it is coercing Lolita. He generates worlds upon worlds. But alongside the malicious intent, there’s something cynical about it.
What I mean is, I used to be as in thrall with Nabokov’s style as anyone else, and anyone else who is going for that kind of dense rhetorical flair from the literature at the turn of the 20th century. Now that I’m older, I can see how, actually, it’s easy to write pretty lines with minimal concern for ideas.
And then H.H. practically corroborated my thought in this passage, from early on in the project of conquering Lolita. In the middle of this par of very long sentences he talks about “automatic stuff,” a “nicely mechanical” “patter”:
Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter — and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular — O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment.
What a brutal last phrase. Humbert’s own ideas can enjoy consent while the object of his desires does not, as if his thoughts are more recognizably human.
Then the turn in the plot comes: Dolores’s mother dies, and Humbert whisks Lolita away from summer camp onto a road trip across America. In one of the chintzy hotels, the horrific deed is done, and H’s prose goes into overdrive with analogies, but the garish details are there:
“…There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” …
Other strange facts about Lolita. It may lowkey be an adaptation of an older story from 1916 called “Lolita” about a middle-aged man’s lust for a preteen girl of the same name.
It also has a “true crime” source, in the kidnapping of Florence Horner by Frank La Salle.
In one scene, while Humbert is grooming Dolores in order to keep their situation a secret from others, he makes an allusion to it in the middle of his maunderings:
Only the other day we read in the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever these are.
The other major aspect about Lolita’s narrator is that he presents the form of consciousness of a European visiting America for the first time and being properly appalled by our savagery. Most memorable is when he notices a red fire hydrant.
I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains.
It’s not an elevated image for its own sake; it’s the mentality of a European noticing all these differences, not at all unlike Nabokov’s own experience coming to America. So, oddly enough, Lolita (or at least Humbert’s document that is the main component of Lolita) joins a venerable literary tradition of “Europeans who were Disappointed by America,” including Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Mann.
One example comes in the sequence at “Beardsley” in New England, where Dolores gets enrolled in a private girls’ school. Humbert’s portrayal of the school’s pedagogy reads as a satire of Dewey’s reformist pragmatism. It’s a stark contrast to the intellectualism of a classical European education.
Says headmistress Pratt:
We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating.
Moments like these, plus the cinematic landscape descriptions and all the interiors stuffed with chintzy Americana, help make Lolita a much more substantial and successful novel relative to Nabokov’s earlier pieces that are much more thinly self-reflexive.
“How did they ever make a film of Lolita??” A fundamental part, according to the Kolker-Abrams book on the life of Kubrick, was the withering away of the Production Code (going the same way as the McCarthyite blacklist).
…Kubrick and Harris were busy navigating the shoals of the Production Code, even as its strictures were slowly unravelling with Psycho [1960] — which was not only violent and sexual but the first film to show a toilet bowl — and the Tennessee Williams adaptation Suddenly, Last Summer [1959], with its themes of homosexuality and cannibalism.
All the same, the pedophilia is heavily downplayed in the movie, for whatever that’s worth.
Pre-production for Lolita (1962) overlapped with the post-production of Spartacus (1960). While Kubrick was editing the gladiator picture, he was meeting regularly with Nabokov to “cinematize” the latter’s book. The production rented a house in the LA suburb of Mandeville Canyon for Nabokov to draft an adapted screenplay in isolation. Basically none of that material got used.
I confess I’m still not into the movie version at all, even though it’s extremely well made and the casting was excellent. Not even the multiple caricatures by Peter Sellers seems to work, even though it’s a revelation that looks forward to Strangelove.
The idea of hiring Sellers came to Kubrick because he began to see the comic aspects of the novel. In 1960, Sellers was just reaching the peak of his career. Famous for The Goon Show, the radio programme broadcast by the BCC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, and in films like The Ladykillers [1955], The Naked Truth [1955], I’m All Right Jack [1959], and The Mouse That Roared [1959], it was Sellers’ album The Best of Sellers and his film The Battle of the Sexes [1959] that finally convinced Kubrick to hire him. […] Stanley also responded to the fundamental enigma of Sellers: who without a role — or roles, since he was famous for playing multiple parts — was an empty vessel. Sellers was the characters he played. ‘There is no such person,’ Kubrick bluntly put it.
Humbert may have been made more sympathetic for the movie, but this latest readthrough of Lolita the novel underscored how clearly his guilt still comes through, even to himself, even though he might have to hide it in French.
He can’t help but confront how thoroughly he’s damaged Dolores’s life, essentially killed her childhood. Late in the book he writes a deranged poem. One of its quatrains is entirely in French, “Lolita, what have I done with your life?”
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m’alita
Son félé — bien fol est qui s’y fie!
Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu’ai-je fait de ta vie?