Lolita At 50, And Forever Young

In the dozen or so years I've been teaching "Lolita" to graduate writing students, more than one now grown woman has told of having read the novel in early puberty and finding the title character an empowering figure—and except for their use of the cant term "empowering" they seem to have turned out just fine. Humbert's "victim," they point out, actually initiates the first full-on sexual encounter, and thereafter she's in control, playing him for clothes, junk food, doodads and a grand tour of America's tackiest tourist traps, doling out her favors while holding a rape charge over his head, and ultimately abandoning him for a new "protector." I'm all for taking empowerment where you find it, but the novel makes clear that, despite her small Pyrrhic victories, this is a broken child. The heartbreaking scene in which we see her playing tennis shows her life in microcosm. She's supremely graceful, "always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home," and she always loses. Her form, Humbert concludes, is "an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis—without any utilitarian results."

Those who know the novel understand that there is no such person as the enchantress "Lolita"—only an ordinary American girl named Dolores Haze, fond of pop music, chewing gum and roller skates, encumbered with a nickname too exotic for her to inhabit. The book's title is an artful misdirection: it points not at its putative heroine, but at her representation in the narrator's mind. And while Humbert Humbert works hard to beguile his readers, he never seduced his creator; in one interview Nabokov called him "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching'." The closest Nabokov came to an expression of sympathy was in the foreword to his own translation of his 1936 Russian novel "Despair." Both Humbert and Herrmann, the narrator of "Despair," are "neurotic scoundrels," Nabokov wrote, "yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year." And while Nabokov's afterword to "Lolita" asserts that the book "has no moral in tow"—that is, it's not a didactic work—he told the critic Edmund Wilson that it was "a highly moral affair." On Halloween night in 1958, a little girl came trick-or-treating to Nabokov's door in Lolita costume, complete with tennis racquet; according to Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography, the man who'd brought Dolores Haze into being was "quite shocked."

In much of Nabokov's work, this bedrock humaneness can be hard to see beneath the baroque artifice, and his preference for high-altitude playfulness over conventional "sincerity"—a word he didn't use without quotation marks—is often mistaken for mandarin iciness. It may in fact have been his way of mastering emotion that might otherwise have mastered him: it's significant that he once said such "beastly" characters as Humbert were "outside my inner self," like gargoyles on the façade of a cathedral, "demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out." In such subsequent novels as "Pale Fire" and "Ada," Nabokov's art may show more prominently than his heart, but "Lolita" strikes an ideal balance. Take, for instance, the climactic moment in which Dolly Haze makes a crucial confession to Humbert. To understand it, you'll need a little refresher on the plot, so sit back and make yourself comfortable.

All through the book, Dolly has been stalked not only by Humbert, but by another pedophile, a famous playwright named Clare Quilty; Quilty first meets her on a visit to her hometown, where his uncle happens to be a dentist. Humbert misses the many clues to Quilty's shadow presence—and so will the first-time reader of the novel, though they're clear enough in retrospect. On a summer road trip across the U.S., Quilty, with Dolly's connivance, follows Humbert and Dolly's car, keeping in touch with her by surreptitious phone calls and furtive meetings. Finally he succeeds in stealing her away to his ranch, where he attempts to inveigle her into making pornographic movies. (And where she refuses to souffler the "beastly boys" he's lined up for her.) Years later, Humbert manages to track her down again—she's married a sweet and clueless young man and has become pregnant—and insists on knowing the name of her abductor. At last she tells him, but in reporting it to us, Humbert is exasperatingly coy: "And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she uttered, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago." Then, instead of the name, we get a flare-up of Humbert's ever-active memory: "Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness?"

Why indeed—and what's he talking about? He's expecting us astute readers to recall an episode 183 pages earlier, when Humbert is swimming with Charlotte Haze, Dolly's mother, at a lake near the Hazes' hometown. When they're far from shore, he has an impulse to drown her in order to possess her daughter unobstructed. (He needn't have worried; she'll shortly be hit and killed by a conveniently passing car.) But he can't bring himself to do it, and when they come out of the water it's noted that Humbert had forgotten to take off his wristwatch. Charlotte (who had bought it for him) proudly says the word "waterproof"—as Humbert describes it, "softly, making a fish mouth." And why should this moment come back to him, several years and 183 pages after the fact, when Dolly makes her revelation? Look in the mirror and watch your lips form the same fish mouth when pronouncing the words "Quilty" and "waterproof."

It's a surpassingly clever stroke—one of many small marvels in this intricately constructed novel. But Nabokov isn't merely a literary watchmaker, with busy little hands and a loupe in his beady eye. From the very first paragraph of Humbert's narrative, he directs our attention to the movements of the mouth: "Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." A few pages later, Humbert gives an unappetizing description of his first wife, the unhappy Valeria: " The mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama." This first mouth-to-mouth comparison of mother and daughter anticipates the second, the far more important resemblance between Charlotte and Dolly Haze.