What better way to mark this occasion than by recording a few of my random thoughts on a great English-language novel I finished just last night? The novel happens to be Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In order to fully enjoy the novel, however, you will have to avoid the many truckloads of horseshit that it has inspired in lieu of “criticism.” It is a love story that is both harrowing and heartbreaking.
The novel is narrated by a man assuming the name Humbert Humbert and it proves, as if it needed to be proved, that a person madly in love is perhaps the most unreliable of narrators. Not even halfway through the novel most of its action has already taken place. Then Humbert and his step-daughter Dolores, known to him rapturously as Lolita, embark on a mad cross-country journey all the way around America, from Ramsdale, a small New England town, southward to the Gulf of Mexico, then all the way across mountains and deserts to California beaches. And after a pause in which Humbert hires a tennis coach for Lolita and considers slipping into Mexico, they travel up the coast, turn east and drive all the way back to a town close to Ramsdale called Beardsley where Humbert enrolls her in an exclusive girls school. All along the way, Nabokov gives the reader a vivid portrait of what V. S. Pritchett called “the highway and motel civilization of the United States.”
As bad as Humbert is, if you cannot bring yourself to forgive him you are committing a crime worse than he did. Near the end of the book he presents to us what he assesses is the magnitude of his crime, which was to deprive Dolores, by then 17 and pregnant with Richard Schiller’s baby, of her childhood. In the last chapter of the book, after he has given Clare Quilty the only send-off he deserved, and got himself in a car chase, driving slowly down the wrong side of the road and been captured, he offers the reader one more impression:
One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors – for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company – both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic – one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
But there is a coincidence in the novel that delighted me. Humbert last sees Lolita living in a tenement in Coalmont with her husband, a decent young yokel named Richard (“Dick”) Schiller:
… there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.
Just as I am retiring today. But the coincidence is, alas, too neat to stand up to scrutiny. In the last paragraph of the novel Humbert expresses his wish that Lolita enjoys a long life and that her child is a boy. As a prologue to Humbert’s story, a psycho-pathologist by the name of John Ray, Jr. matter-of-factly informs the reader that Humbert “died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start”, and that “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.”
So, it turned out, Humbert’s Lolita died only one week before her 18th birthday.
* The Enchanted Hunters was the name of the hotel where Nabokov staged Humbert and Lolita's first tryst.
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