years after LOLITA
Fifty years ago this autumn, the great Vladimir Nabokov held in his hands the first copy of his dangerous, funny, heartbreaking novel, Lolita. Given the book’s future status as a masterpiece, it looked ridiculously humble: a paperback in the Traveller’s Companion series, issued in Paris by Maurice Girodias, a pornographer. Girodias published some good writers, but made his money from masturbation fantasies for English- speaking tourists, with titles like The Whip Angels
or White Thighs.
Nabokov’s agent sent Lolita to Girodias because U.S. publishers feared that a story focused on a middle-aged man’s sexual relationship with a girl of 12 could get them charged with obscenity. Even Nabokov was nervous. He considered publishing under a pseudonym.
Lolita sold slowly until Graham Greene rescued it. Late in 1955, when it was still unknown, he said in a London Sunday Times
feature that it was one of the year’s three best books. Publishers were emboldened, and by 1958, Lolita was on sale in several countries, including Canada, without legal hindrance.
Its success created a new life for Nabokov (1899- 1977), till then a muchadmired author with a modest following. Lolita’s sales let him quit his teaching job and spend the rest of his days writing.
Two movies have kept the story in circulation, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version with James Mason as the evil Humbert Humbert and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 update, starring Jeremy Irons. The book itself has remained in print and on many university courses. Two years ago Azar Nafisi wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which she reported that her secret literature class felt liberated when they defied Iran’s Islamic theocracy to discuss it. Their transgression was made all the more piquant by the fact that in Iran a man can legally marry a nine- year- old.
Among other things, Nabokov made “Lolita” a word in the language. Twenty years after his book appeared, a magazine referred to Charlie Chaplin’s “Lolita-like relationships” and no one had to ask what that meant. In Jim Jarmusch’s recent film, Broken Flowers, Bill Murray encounters a sexually provocative girl of about 13 named Lolita, and learns the startling fact that she’s unaware of her name’s significance.
At the beginning, critics had trouble coming to grips with Nabokov’s novel and often found their own reactions unsettling. Lionel Trilling said that while any decent person would consider Humbert’s actions intolerable, his language almost wins the reader’s affection. Elizabeth Janeway said in The New York Times that on first reading she thought
Lolita one of the funniest books she
had encountered; on second reading she decided it was one of the
saddest.
The story works on at least
three levels. As a picture of
America it’s brilliant satire; as
a depiction of Humbert’s
character it’s harsh psychological comedy; and as a narrative it’s a tragedy of misplaced love.
Tonally, it’s always complicated. Nabokov
shifts effortlessly from
one genre to another
— detective story, revenge drama, legal brief,
road story, confession and
fairy tale.