GUEST REVIEWER A SENSE OF THE AB SURD PERMEATES NABOKOV’S “LOLITA”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29104, 16 January 1960, Page 3

GUEST REVIEWER A SENSE OF THE AB SURD PERMEATES NABOKOV’S “LOLITA”

[This review of “Lolita," a prohibited import in New Zealand, is from “The Times Literary Supplement.”]

“.Lolita” was first printed in English by the Olympia Press of Paris, four years ago. An edition has been published and widely sold in the United States, and the book has already received some attention in this country. One beneficial result of such attention is that most readers of this review will know that the book concerns a love affair between a man in his late thirties and a girl in her early teens; and, with so much knowledge safely assumed, it is possible to consider Mr Nabokov’s intentions in writing the book, and his success in achieving them. Mr Nabokov was born and brought up in Russia, and left the country as a refugee after the Revolution, when he was 20 years old. He has written several novels in Russian (the best of them, he tells us, have not been translated into English), and English is for him, as it was for Conrad, a language painfully learnt. His idiomatic grasp of this new language is remarkable; yet he is essentially right, surely, in saying that “my private tragedy ... is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.” It is not merely that he writes “strangulated” when he means “strangled” and “repulsed” when he means “repelled.” These are trivialities; but every so often we are brought up disconcertingly by the sense that English is not for Mr Nabokov a natural medium, but one in which he is seeking with a dubious self-conscious irony “the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.” This is the refuge, the immortality, that at the end of this book Humbert Humbert promises his Lolita. It is also the goal of Mr Nabokov, who denies explicitly what some of his admirers have solemnly asserted, that “Lolita” is a piece of didactic fiction. The book, he says, has no moral in tow:

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow.

somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiousity. tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm'.

We are reminded that an argument about morality similar to that which has recently concerned “Lolita” raged about “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and there are interesting resemblances between the authors’ attitudes. Wilde, like Mr wished that his book should be judged as a work of art, irrespective of its morality. Like Mr Nabokov he wrote in a style most carefully constructed, the style of an art for art’s sake artist, who is playing with words, in Wilde’s case rhapsodically, in that of Nabokov through clownish, bawdy or farcical comedy. Mr Nabokov’s rich sense of the comic and the absurd permeates “Lolita.” Scene after scene that might be tedious or unpleasant becomes under his conjuring hand uproariously funny. Such are, for example, Humbert Humbert’s disgust when, in a brothel, he is offered “a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids” who sits on a chair “perfunctorily nursing a bald doll,” instead of the slim nymphet he has been expecting: or his courtship of and matriage to Lolita’s mother, Mrs Haze, who is stigmatized as “that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman”; or the failure of his plans for seducing Lolita while asleep, when the deadly sleeping pill he has given her proves completely innocuous; or the slow-motion account of a murder at the end of the book. Nor is Mr Nabokov funny merely about sex and minor horrors of American life, the various but almost equally awful motels in which Humbert and Lolita make love, the petrol stations, and the cafes with names like “The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful,” have never been described, in themselves and in their implications, with more , biting irony. Where “Lolita” fails, as by high standards it assuredly does, is in the attempt to use these comic and ironic elements in making a tragic picture. We are meant to find tragedy in Humbert Humbert’s flight across America with the Lolita whose youth he has remorse-

lessly destroyed, in the pursuit of them by the playwright who also has an eye for nymphets, and in the final total destruction of Lolita and her middle-aged lovers. But we can never accept as a tragic figure, or even as a medium for tragedy, the clownish Humbert who asks, “What’s the katter with misses?”, whose misadventures are consistently ludicrous, who says of Lolita at fourteen that “Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than ever, with her apricot-coloured limbs, in her sub-teen tennis togs.” Those sub-teen tennis togs which are typical of much else in the book, are too deliberate a literary touch, so that we have the sense very ' strongly of Mr Nabokov pulling a puppet’s strings. It is 1 all very well for the author to say that “my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him,” but there is in this book very often a blended whimsicality and sentiment, quite destructive of the finest sort of seriousness, that belongs properly not to Humbert Humbert but to Mr Nabokov himself. (A similar feeling may be found in the very different context of Mr Betjeman’s poems.) And it is, finally, less of Wilde that one is reminded by Mr Nabokov’s naughtiness and the insistent self-consciousness of his style than of James Branch Cabell, whose pawky, farcical or worldly sexual humour also seemed to many people forty years ago wonderfully sophisticated, and whose “Jurgen” had, like “Lolita,” some trouble with the censor.-“ Lolita” is a markedly original book, with dozens of brilliant comic passages in it: but “Jurgen” may serve as a cautionary tale to those critics who in their worthy wish to attack the rigidities of censorship have been deceived into calling it a great novel.