The Books: Arguably, ‘Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

In December, 2005 Hitchens wrote an essay about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, using it as an opportunity to discuss The Annotated Lolita, by Alfred Appel Jr. (which Hitchens seems to appreciate very much, and he was pretty hard to please). This is not the only piece about Nabokov that Hitchens ever wrote, of course, but it’s the only one included in Arguably. Hitchens returns to Nabokov again and again, as a lover of language himself – also as someone who chose America as his home. Nabokov chose America too. Lolita was his first novel in English, a fact that blows my mind. And there’s something about those people who become Masters of the English language even though English is not their native tongue! Nabokov. Joseph Conrad. Those are the two on my list. But whatever list there is would be a small one. Lolita is about a lot of things, but one of the things it is REALLY about is language, and that can be lost in the shuffle of the absolutely shattering events of the plot (as well as the fact that the entire thing is narrated by a Creep of the Highest Order, and there are times, while reading Lolita, that you just ache to get the fuck AWAY from him.) Lolita is also a road trip across America, with its cheap motels and tailfinned cars and soda counters and drive-in movies. Sometimes it takes someone who ain’t from here originally to tell us who we are, what we look like, what we seem like.

The accomplishment of Lolita is mind-boggling in pretty much any context. I have not read the Annotated Lolita, but Hitchens’ piece makes me curious. Hitchens addresses the content of Lolita, of course, and how his perspective changed once he had two young daughters of his own. He lists some of the lines that made him actually re-coil from the book once he read it as a protective father. He discusses Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and how the dovetails are obvious with the commodification of virginity, of female-ness being Up for Sale, Up for Grabs, and how the young ladies of Tehran obviously related to the story wholeheartedly. Hitchens wonders, though, if they actually caught the chilling fact in the opener of the book – that “Lolita” actually died in childbirth. It’s listed in the “medical report” that opens the book, and it is her married name, so while the fact is there in cold black-and-white print, some people still miss it. Lolita was over before she even began.

It’s a very interesting essay in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita’, by Christopher Hitchens

Once you start to take a shy hand in the endless game of decoding the puns and allusions and multiple entendres (the Umberto echoes, if I may be allowed) that give this novel its place next to Ulysses, you are almost compelled to agree with Freud that the unconscious never lies. Swinburne’s poem Dolores sees a young lady (“Our Lady of Pain”) put through rather more than young Miss Haze. Lord Byron’s many lubricities are never far away; in the initial stages of his demented scheme Humbert quotes from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thine soft cheek a parent’s kiss,” and when we look up the lines we find they are addressed to Harold’s absent daughter (who, like Byron’s child and Nobokov’s longest fiction, is named Ada). Humbert’s first, lost girlfriend, Annabel, is perhaps not unrelated to Byron’s first wife, Anne Isabella, who was known as “Annabella,” and she has parents named Leigh, just like Byron’s ravished half-sister Augusta. The Haze family physician, who gives Humbert the sleeping pills with which he drugs Lolita preparatory to the first rape at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, is named Dr. Byron. And while we are on the subject of physicians, remember how Humbert is recommended to “an excellent dentist”:

Our neighbor, in fact, Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him “brace” her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little.

Another Quilty, with his own distinctive hint of sadism. “Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start,” as Humbert reflects, those three so ordinary words “at the start” packing a huge, even gross, potential weight … These clues are offset by more innocuous puns (“We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop 1001”) and by dress rehearsals for puns, as when Humbert decides to decline a possible joke about the Mann Act, which forbids the interstate transport of girls for immoral purposes. (Alexander Dolinin has recently produced a fascinating article on the contemporaneous abduction of a girl named Sally Horner, traces of the reportage of which are to be found throughout Lolita.)

All is apparently redeemed, of course, by the atrocious punishment that Nabokov inflicts for this most heinous of humanity’s offenses. The molester in The Enchanter was hit by a truck, and Humbert dies so many little deaths – eroding his heart muscles most pitifully – that in some well-wrought passages we almost catch ourselves feeling sorry for him. But the urge to punish a crime (“Why dost thou lash that whore?” Shakespeare makes us ask ourselves in King Lear) is sometimes connected to the urge to commit it. Naming a girls’ school for Beardsley must have taken a good deal of reflection, with more Sade than Lewis Carroll in it, but perhaps there is an almost inaudible note of redemption at Humbert and Lolita’s last meeting (the only time, as he ruefully minutes, that she ever calls him “honey”), when “I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”

The most unsettling suggestion of all must be the latent idea that nymphomania is, as well as a form of sex, a form of love.

Alfred Appel’s most sage advice is to make yourself slow down when reading Lolita, not be too swiftly ravished and caught up. Follow this counsel and you will find that – more than almost any other novel of our time – it keeps the promise of genius and never presents itself as the same story twice. I mentioned the relatively obvious way in which it strikes one differently according to one’s age; and if aging isn’t a theme here, with its connotation of death and extinction, then I don’t know what is. But there are other ways in which Lolita is, to annex Nabokov’s word, “telescopic.” Looking back on it, he cited a critic who “suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel,” and continued, “The substitution ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.” That’s profoundly true, and constitutes the most strenuous test of the romantic idea that worshipful time will forgive all those who love, and who live by, language. After half a century this work’s “transgressiveness” makes every usage of that term in our etiolated English departments seem stale, pallid, and domesticated.