Stalking Nabokov (43 page)

For me these are the things that makes Tolstoy’s style so unique, not his visual details. When he lectured on
Anna Karenin
, Nabokov would spend some time drawing for his students a model of the first-class cars on the St. Petersburg–Moscow night express trains. Useful to know, but what matters much more is the situation that Tolstoy so carefully prepares: Anna on the train all night listening to Vronsky’s mother talk proudly of her son, Anna stepping off the train in Moscow, seeing Vronsky waiting for his mother, trying to suppress her sense of amused recognition because she has seen him before and sees he doesn’t recognize her and yet unknown to him he has been a main subject of conversation all night long. And there is something about that discreet look of interest and suppressed amusement from Anna that beguiles Vronsky—who evidently hasn’t particularly noticed her before—to the point where he immediately makes the first move in his long campaign to win her.

I began dissecting the start of
Anna Karenina
with a look at insistent repetitions of word and phrase. I explained them as evidence of Tolstoy’s exceptional predilection for analysis. Nabokov describes the mark of the “groping purist” in Tolstoy: “what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy’s meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words” (
LRL
238). There Nabokov parodies Tolstoy, he plays with Tolstoy, he strikes images off Tolstoy—and in doing so he deliberately undermines his own parody because Tolstoy does not play.

That leads to another reason for those insistent repetitions. Tolstoy the moralist has misgivings about Tolstoy the artist, let alone about other artists or about art that involves parody, play, imagination, invention. Nabokov writes of the “rejection of false elegancies” in Tolstoy’s style “and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense” (
LRL
228). Rather than succumb to the false elegancies of conventional art, Tolstoy preferred to be uncompromising to the point of gracelessness.

If we turn now to
Lolita
we find in its author someone who revels in art, in artifice, in pattern. There’s a wonderful television documentary of Nabokov being asked to read the start of the Russian
Lolita
.
⁸
He agrees to do so, but turns to the camera, peers over his glasses, and as he reaches for the
English
text of
Lolita
declares: “Incrrredible as it may seem, not everybody remembers the opening of
Lolita
in
English”—
and he begins to read:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. 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.

That is fun: the extravagance of the profession of passion, the extravagance of the phrasing. But the artifice seems so pronounced by that third sentence that while it captivates by its lilt and amuses by its comic clatter, it seems to drown out sense. In fact, Christopher Ricks points out that what sense you can see seems suspect: in an English “t” the tongue taps the alveolar ridge, not the teeth. Julian Barnes takes up Ricks’s point in
Flaubert’s Parrot
when he quotes this sentence in a catalogue of mistakes in literature. But the mistake is theirs: there is very meticulous sense here: Nabokov is defining as patiently as Tolstoy—OK, not that patiently, but as patiently as he can—or rather he has Humbert explain in his exuberant way that Lolita’s name is to be pronounced with a Spanish “t,” not a thick American one: Low-leed-uh.

Behind the pattern, there is sense. And behind that, more sense: Lolita was conceived on a honeymoon in Vera Cruz, and her name is her parents’ memento of the occasion, along with “a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin” and “some more Mexican trash” in the hallway of the Haze home that confirm Humbert’s repugnance at the idea of lodging there until he sees Lolita herself. And those words that had seemed all pattern prove as aptly related to
source
as to
sense
or
subject
: Humbert fusses over the pronunciation of Lolita’s name because he is a scholar of Romance languages and literatures, and a pedant, at the same time as he also romanticizes himself as a lover and a poet.

Nabokov foregrounds the artifice here as much as possible, but behind that extravagance, which he has obviously enjoyed concocting (surely no other novel starts off with a fancier verbal flourish), he nevertheless distances himself from Humbert’s style (he never began a book in his own voice with anything like this flamboyance)—which only adds another level of camouflage, another level of artifice.

Nabokov believed that there is something deeply artful about the world not in the sense of Wilde’s patter of paradoxes, not in the sense of the postmodern cliché that all knowledge is a fictional construct, but in the sense that there seems to be detail and design that endlessly proliferate the deeper one looks into things, as if reality is almost playfully deceptive in concealing so much and allowing so much to be discovered by human eyes. And Nabokov’s sense of the artifice behind nature came from looking closely at nature as a specialist in butterflies. In foregrounding artifice as he does in
Lolita’
s opening lines, he is true to his sense of the ultimate reality of things, but his truth could hardly be more different from Tolstoy’s.

As John Bayley observes, Tolstoy had an obsessive desire to see life steadily and see it whole.
⁹
Nabokov could see that that was impossible. As a lepidopterist, he knew that the world was too rich, too endlessly special-ized in every direction, to allow for the mastery Tolstoy sought. The human mind has to work at discovering its world, and the more it discovers of the excitement of detail, the more mysterious seems its inability to understand what lies behind it all. Rather than try to capture the whole, Nabokov tries to vivify the part. So he chooses an off-center, unexpected detail: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.”

In Stiva, or even in Lyovin, Tolstoy shows the natural egotism of the human mind and by showing it shows us with a sense of both surprise and recognition how much unites us even in what divides us. But where Tolstoy opts for the common ground, Nabokov chooses a patch of rare earth: not someone in whom we want to recognize anything of ourselves but a perverse obsessive, an eccentric, a monster. Nabokov believes in the inalienable difference of person from person, and in that he again reflects his biological training. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it, “All evolutionary biologists know that variation is itself nature’s irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are abstractions.”
¹⁰

Humbert sees how others see Lolita: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning. . . . She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.” But he wants to see her in his own way, his own terms— “But in my arms she was always Lolita”—just as he chooses his own kind of sexual pleasure in defiance of social norms.

“But in my arms she was always Lolita”: Humbert presents himself as a romantic, a lover whose love elevates Lolita to heights beyond her mundane world of teenage moods and modes. But Nabokov, who can celebrate love as a way of partially transcending the essential isolation of the soul, introduces a love affair where Humbert pays no attention to Lolita herself, simply worshipping the image that he has fabricated and enslaving the live child whose independence he ignores. She might be called Lo to her mother, or Dolly to herself and her friends, but Humbert sees and celebrates her, appropriates her, as Lolita, a name no one else ever uses, a name Leona Toker insists we should refuse to employ if we don’t want to be complicit in Humbert’s crime.
¹¹

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Nabokov chooses to portray an exceptional, obsessive mind, fixated on his one object. But at the same time he gives Humbert astonishing mental freedom, the freedom to write with such flair, in the opening paragraph; with such a capacity for seeing other points of view while insisting on his own, as in the second paragraph; or with such self-awareness, and such a capacity for self-detachment, as he now discloses in the third paragraph. He is fixated yet free; blinded by his passion yet extraordinarily clear sighted; trapped yet uncannily mobile. And for Nabokov that is an image of us all: he perpetually celebrates the munificence, the power, the freedom of human consciousness, and he perpetually protests against its imprisonment in the self and in the here and now.

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” But the first-time reader hasn’t known until this line that the narrator is a murderer. Quite a clanger to find dropped on the first page. Nabokov has a very strong sense of the reader, as does Humbert himself, where Tolstoy tends to provide the illusion of transparency, a sense that we are sharing in or even living out the unmediated experience of the characters. Nabokov by contrast reminds us of our distance and continues to do so: Humbert discloses that he has murdered someone but plays a game with us as he misleads us as to
whom
he has murdered, thereby upending the detective story pattern and, as I suggested in the biography (
VNAY
227–54), thereby also introducing the important theme of the difference between a forward and a rearward view of time, simultaneously one of the novel’s most playful and its most morally serious themes.

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” strikes me as an inverted echo of Ivan Karamazov in the courtroom saying: “
S ubiitsa nel’zya zhe sprashivat’ krasnorechiya”
(
Brothers Karamazov
, 12.5), which we could translate as, “You can never count on a murderer for eloquence,” an echo that can perhaps be explained by Nabokov’s thinking of Dostoevsky as a writer of detective fiction. At any rate, it’s no accident that this first invocation of the inverted detective-story pattern of the book comes between two allusions to the founder of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe.

“In a princedom by the sea. . . . Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.” Since Humbert is about to present us with his account of his traumatic first love, on a Riviera beach—whom he names Annabel Leigh in honor of Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” about a girl torn away as a child from her lover—here he twice echoes Poe’s poem. The man he murders, Clare Quilty, will take on, in Humbert’s telling, the quality of a grim double, again like a character out of Poe. And Humbert, as a scholar of French and English poetry, is very familiar with Poe, a writer championed by Baudelaire and more celebrated in French literary culture than in English.

Humbert sees his life, quite self-consciously, in terms of works of art. Nabokov employs these images quite differently. Although he sees life as inherently artistic, he also signals the difference between life and art, in fact tries to define the limitations on human life by their contrast with the possibilities of art, where you can enter the mind of a character or revisit endlessly a story’s past. But Humbert tries to turn other people in his life, on his own level of being, into works of art: Lolita, as an object of celebration, a sort of miraculous willed revival of Annabel Leigh, and Quilty, as the victim of a carefully staged murder. Humbert travesties the values Nabokov sees in art: Humbert inflates his ego and reduces other people to the level of his creations, where art for Nabokov allows a kind of transcendence of the self. Humbert reduces Lolita to his creation, where Nabokov does all he can to show, behind Humbert’s rhapsodies, the live reality of her appalling life. Humbert tries to reduce Lolita to the object of his fancies, but she remains utterly remote from him, utterly inaccessible. For Nabokov art is about respecting and yet being able to enter the otherness of others, as we cannot do in life.
That
is what he means when he says in the afterword to
Lolita
: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar 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 (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (
Lolita
316–17).