Lolita At 50, And Forever Young

We've just made it through the American library Association's 27th annual Banned Books Week, and I hope you spent it as festively as I did. You might have read your kids the most-challenged book of 2007, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson's "And Tango Makes Three," the 2005 children's book about the pair of real-life male penguins in Central Park who hatched an egg together. (Its alleged offenses, according to the ALA: "Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint,

Unsuited to Age Group.") Or you might have revisited that perennial recidivist "Huckleberry Finn," No. 5 on last year's list ("Racism"), or perhaps the book that just edged out Huck for fourth place, Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" ("Religious Viewpoint"), or the book Huck displaced, Alice Walker's sixth-place "The Color Purple" ("Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language"). So many transgressive pleasures, so little time.

Or you might have followed the lead of the folks who run the Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque, Iowa, who observed Banned Books Week with an event called "Reading 'Lolita' in Dubuque." "How can I participate?" its Web site asked. Why, simply "by checking out Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 classic novel 'Lolita' and Azar Nafisi's 2003 memoir 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'." Iowans have been touchy about their supposed censoriousness since the 1920s, when Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, announced that his new magazine would not be edited "for the old lady in Dubuque," and this event seemed to be their latest act of defiance. But "Lolita" hasn't been seriously threatened in the United States for decades. As far as I can tell, the book's last skirmish with the foot soldiers of decency was back in January 2006, when the Marion County, Fla., library system fended off a challenge to remove it from unrestricted access; county commissioners backed the librarian by a 3-2 vote.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the first American edition of "Lolita." It had appeared in France three years earlier, under the imprint of Paris's Olympia Press, an arty-shady purveyor of both edgy English-language literature and straight-up erotica. Nabokov, not wanting to endanger his job at Cornell, had at first wanted to publish it under a pseudonym; it was banned in France in 1956. When the G.P. Putnam edition came out in August 1958, New York Times critic Orville Prescott called it "repulsive" and a work of "highbrow pornography," but he was drowned out by praise from the likes of Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, William Styron and Lionel Trilling. By late September, "Lolita" was the best-selling book in America, and Life magazine had sent reporters and photographers to Ithaca, N.Y., where Nabokov had lived in a series of rented houses and apartments and was beginning what turned out to be his final semester. Nabokov delighted in the success of "Lolita," which enabled him at last to quit the teaching he'd done to support himself since coming to the United States in 1940, although—in a characteristic fit of aggrieved egotism—he wrote to his sister that "this all ought to have happened thirty years ago."

Despite its subject matter, "Lolita" makes a tough target for the censors. Unlike "And Tango Makes Three," it's hardly a book addressed to impressionable children. They wouldn't get past its lacily alliterative first line—"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins"—with its carefully balanced pairings ("light/fire," "life/loins"). Nor would they be able to decode its fancy-dan language. Humbert Humbert describes his hyperbolically large erection as "a foot of engorged brawn," and he reports Dolly Haze's blunter mode of speech with Francophonic delicacy: " 'I said no, I'm just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys'." And "Lolita" now comes impregnably armored in literary reputation. In 1998, the board of the Modern Library voted it No. 4 on its list of the 20th century's greatest English-language novels, behind "The Great Gatsby," "Ulysses"—another distinguished dead horse the prudes have given up on beating—and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." And Nafisi's memoir, in which she surreptitiously teaches the novel to a group of Iranian women, testifies to its broad and enduring appeal.

There are probably a few people left who still have the idea that "Lolita" is a Ribald Classic (a.k.a. "romp") like "Tom Jones" (which Nabokov, by the way, found "horribly dull") or a pornographic farce in which we slaver along with an aging roué in his pursuit of a seductive (a.k.a. "nubile") young minx who basically has it coming to her. But anyone who's read the book knows that Humbert Humbert is a fearful, treacherous and guilt-ridden man in early middle age, and that his victim is a confused 12-year-old, whose father has died and whose mother fears and resents her budding sexuality. The dominant note of Humbert's yearlong erotic rhapsody is "her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep."