August 18, 1958

Books of the Times

By ORVILLE PRESCOTT

LOLITA. By Vladimir Nabokov

Certain books achieve a sort of underground reputation before they are published. Gossip arouses expectations that they are even nastier than the last succès de scandale. College students returning from visits to Paris demonstrate their newly acquired sophistication by brandishing paperbound copies. College professors write solemn critical analyses in scholarly publications. And if their authors are really lucky some act of official censorship publicizes their work to the masses. "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov is such a book. Mr. Nabokov is particularly lucky because his book was not censored in the United States, but in France of all places. What more could he hope for? The French ban was eventually removed and now this book written in English in the United States by a White Russian emigré can be bought legally in Paris where it was first published. Its American publication today has been preceded by a fanfare of publicity. Prof. Harry Levin of Harvard says it is a great book and darkly symbolical (Mr. Nabokov explicitly denies any symbolism). Graham Greene says that “Lolita” is a distinguished novel. William Styron says it is "uniquely droll" and "genuinely funny."

Novel Found Dull and Fatuous

"Lolita," then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.

"Lolita" is not crudely crammed with Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs and explicitly described scenes of sexual violence. Its depravity is more refined. Mr. Nabokov, whose English vocabulary would astound the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, does not write cheap pornography. He writes highbrow pornography. Perhaps that is not his intention. Perhaps he thinks of his book as a satirical comedy and as an exploration of abnormal psychology. Nevertheless, "Lolita" is disgusting.

This is a first-person narrative written in prison by a middle- aged European intellectual and pervert called Humbert Humbert. A literary dilettante who had spent considerable time in various sanitariums, Humbert suffered from a mental illness that made him lust for young girls.

"Lolita" is his account of his two-year love affair with a child aged 12 to 14. Part of its theoretical comedy probably lies in the fact that the child, Lolita, turns out to be just as corrupt as Humbert—a notion that does not strike one as notably funny.

The narrative structure of "Lolita" concerns Humbert's marriage to Lolita's mother to be near the object of his passion, the mother's accidental death, the two years spent by Humbert and Lolita roaming the United States by automobile, Lolita's elopement with another middle-aged man, and Humbert's descent into insanity.

All this is described by Humbert with elaborate self-mockery, with much analysis of his distraught emotions and with considerable reportorial attention to the world of the American roadside: hotels, motels, restaurants, filling stations and scenic attractions.

Jocularity Appears Forced

Humbert's prose style is self-consciously ornate and wonderfully tiresome. He tries hard to be witty and once in a long while says something clever, but most of his jocularity is forced and flat. This failure to be funny might be an integral part of Humbert's sick mind. But Mr. Nabokov fails to be funny, too, when he supplies material for Humbert's story. Some of his efforts at farce are painfully inept, about on the same level as his "humor" in calling a girls' school "St. Algebra."

"Lolita" is a demonstration of the artistic pitfall that awaits a novelist who invades the clinical field of the case history. Since a large proportion of the human race is emotionally unbalanced and neuroses are so common as almost to be normal, novelists must rightly concern themselves with disturbed minds. But there is a line that is artistically perilous to cross.

When mental illness eliminates the ability to choose, when the patient is no longer responsible for his conduct but only the victim of his mania, there is little left for the novelist to discuss.

A great writer, a genius like Shakespeare, can write superbly of King Lear; but Shakespeare surrounded Lear by other interesting characters and did not write exclusively from within Lear's ruined mind. The writer's subject is human conduct and the motives that inspire it. A madman has no motives, only forces he responds to. His ravaged brain belongs to the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, not to novelists.

Past the artistic danger line of madness is another even more fatal. It is where the particular mania is a perversion like Humbert's. To describe such a perversion with the pervert's enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible. If Mr. Nabokov tried to do so he failed.