Stalking Nabokov (53 page)
LOLITA
: Hi.
Sitting on the step of the porch, she scoops peaches out of a can with her hand, and eats them. The syrup drips
.
HUMBERT
: You like peaches.
LOLITA
: Who doesn’t? You want one?
HUMBERT
: No, no. I generally wait until after the sun goes down.
LOLITA
: For what?
HUMBERT
: Peaches.
He gazes at her bare arms. She begins to pick up pebbles with her feet and tosses them at the can. The sound of pebbles hitting the can: ping ping…
LOLITA
: How come?
HUMBERT
: Keeps the lions away. I learned that in Africa.
LOLITA
: Learned what?
HUMBERT
: About peaches.
She looks at him and grins
.
LOLITA
: You’re nuts.
Since Schiff retained the scene and Lyne filmed it, although he excised it in the editing room, we can presume they had aims similar to Pinter’s, at least in this scene. What do we infer of their sense of the relationship between Humbert and Lolita here? What aspects of Humbert and of Lolita in the novel does this illuminate or obscure?
We then look at the scene through one more lens, the most surprising of all. Nabokov traveled to Hollywood to write a screenplay for Kubrick in 1960, but his text was drastically rewritten at the end of the year by Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris. Nabokov received full screenplay credit, nevertheless, so that his literary reputation could serve as yet another line of defense against the forces of censorship that they feared potentially massing over the horizon. In 1974 Nabokov published his own screenplay. There the scene of the first conversation between Lolita and Humbert takes six pages. Although it incorporates “She’s a fright. And mean. And lame” from Humbert’s first diary entry (
Lolita
43), Nabokov makes the action follow directly from Humbert’s decision to move into the Haze home. The new scene shows us Humbert not as seen by himself, debonair, impassioned, dramatic, wry but as seen from outside, creepily persistent, slyly circumspect, disconcertingly sleazy:
LOLITA
: Did you see the fire?
HUMBERT
: No, it was all over when I came. Poor Mr. McCoo looked badly shaken.
LOLITA
: You look badly shaken yourself.
HUMBERT
: Why, no. I’m all right. I suppose I should change into lighter clothes. There’s a ladybird on your leg.
LOLITA
: It’s a ladybug, not a ladybird.
She transfers it to her finger and attempts to coax it into flight.
HUMBERT
: You should blow. Like this. There she goes.
LOLITA
: Ginny McCoo—she’s in my class, you know. And she said you were going to be her tutor.
HUMBERT
: Oh, that’s greatly exaggerated. The idea was I might help her with her French.
LOLITA
: She’s grim, Ginny.
HUMBERT
: Is she—well, attractive?
LOLITA
: She’s a fright. And mean. And lame.
HUMBERT
: Really? That’s curious. Lame?
LOLITA
: Yah. She had polio or something. Are you going to help me with my homework?
HUMBERT
:
Mais oui
, Lolita.
Aujourd’hui?
Charlotte comes in.
CHARLOTTE
: That’s where you are.
LOLITA
: He’s going to help me with my homework.
CHARLOTTE
: Fine. Mr. Humbert, I paid your taxi and had the man take your things upstairs. You owe me four dollars thirty-five. Later, later. Dolores, I think Mr. Humbert would like to rest.
HUMBERT
: Oh no, I’ll help her with pleasure.
Charlotte leaves.
LOLITA
: Well, there’s not much today. Gee, school will be over in three weeks.
A pause.
HUMBERT
: May I—I want to pluck some tissue paper out of that box. No, you’re lying on it. There—let me—thanks.
LOLITA
: Hold on. This bit has my lipstick on it.
HUMBERT
: Does your mother allow lipstick?
LOLITA
: She does not. I hide it here.
She indraws her pretty abdomen and produces the lipstick from under the band of her shorts.
HUMBERT
: You’re a very amusing little girl. Do you often go to the lake shore? I shaw—I mean, I saw that beautiful lake from the plane.
LOLITA
: (
lying back with a sigh
): Almost never. It’s quite a way. And my mummy’s too lazy to go there with me. Besides, we kids prefer the town pool.
HUMBERT
: Who is your favorite recording star?
LOLITA
: Oh, I dunno.
HUMBERT
: What grade are you in?
LOLITA
: This a quiz?
HUMBERT
: I only want to know more about you. I know that you like to solarize your solar plexus. But what else do you like?
LOLITA
: You shouldn’t use such words, you know.
HUMBERT
: Should I say “what you
dig”
?
LOLITA
: That’s old hat.
Pause. Lolita turns over on her tummy. Humbert, awkwardly squatting, tense, twitching, mutely moaning, devours her with sad eyes; Lolita, a restless sunbather, sits up again.
HUMBERT
: Is there anything special you’d like to be when you grow up?
LOLITA
: What?
(
LAS
42–45)
What is different—from the students’ own versions, the film versions, the Schiff-Pinter screenplay, and the novel—in Nabokov’ screenplay? What can we infer about Nabokov’s aims in this scene in the screenplay? What does the scene suggest about his attitudes to Humbert and Lolita? How and why are these attitudes more difficult to infer from the novel? What does the difference between the screenplay and the novel suggest of Nabokov’s attitude to the audiences for each form?
What do we gain, and what do we lose, from the screenplay’s more objective view of Humbert? Although it is morally clearer—and may therefore help some of the more susceptible students not to succumb to Humbert’s seductiveness of style—it is also artistically thinner. Why? Students are encouraged to think about the purpose of the novel’s rich diction, imagery, and narrative self-consciousness; about the purpose and value of its characterization of Humbert from within; about the role of its humor. Why does Nabokov himself change the effect of the scene so dramatically from novel to screenplay? Because of a change of medium? For a different imagined audience? Because of a new attitude to the story? Does the screenplay scene make explicit what Nabokov would like his best readers to infer from the novel itself? Does it perhaps reflect his awareness that some readers had not inferred so well, that he had made Humbert even more persuasive than he intended?
How do we take the screenplay into consideration as evidence for reading the novel? Does it have the same evidentiary value as the Schiff screenplay or the Kubrick and Lyne films? If not, why not? What does our answer suggest about authors and authorial intentions and our response to them? How does it throw light on the Wimsatt-Beardsley notion of the intentional fallacy? How do Nabokov’s changes (and he made others: minor ones for the Russian translation of
Lolita
he prepared between 1963 and 1965 and major ones during the novel’s evolution from the 1939 Russian ur-
Lolita
,
The Enchanter
, to
Lolita
) affect the notion of the unity or finality of a work of art?
What does a comparison of these different versions of the first meeting and first conversation of Humbert and Lolita suggest about the way we should read the novel? Are there aspects of the novel that already prefigure the kind of reading of the scene, or of the relationship between Humbert and Lolita in general, that we infer from juxtaposing screenplay and novel? Or does reading with that kind of imaginative independence of Humbert prove almost impossible? If so, why has Nabokov made it so difficult?
What advantages are there of the more complex but potentially more misleading presentation of the novel over the less complex and perhaps less treacherous presentation in the film? Does it become a different story on page and screen? Should a story, in order to stay the same story, be transformed as it moves from one medium to the other? Does a story stay the same story when it is transformed in medium or emphasis? What creative potentials remain within the constraints of a given story or even a single scene?
Nabokov’s Fallibility; Or, How to Revise
Lolita
Nabokov has a reputation for exactness, but as readers of the manuscript index cards of
The Original of Laura
now know, he could also be error-prone. A single mismatched detail in the internal dating of
Lolita
has led some good Nabokov critics and other keen readers, accustomed to unreliable narration and postmodern self-undermining, to see much in the late stages of
Lolita
as hallucinatory. Like most others aware of the discrepancy, I think it a simple mistake, and the various alternative readings that construe it as an intentional clue become more confused than Nabokov’s text. But the discrepancy also offers a revelation.
The
New Yorker’
s wonderful research department several times saved Mr. Nabokov—who seems to combine a good deal of absentmindedness with his pedantism—from various blunders regarding names, numbers, book titles and the like.
1
In
Pnin
Nabokov glances at one of the most famous mistakes in literature, when night after night Victor tries to induce sleep by sinking into fantasies of himself as a king about to flee, pacing, as he awaits rescue, a strand on the Bohemian Sea. Ben Jonson was the first to mock Shakespeare for having a ship wrecked on the coast of Bohemia in
The Winter’s Tale
; Samuel Johnson assumes Shakespeare is “little careful of geography”;
Tristram Shandy
turns the point to its own advantage.
2
But Coleridge more than once talked of having often dismissed as a fault in Shakespeare what he later saw as a “beauty.” Just as Victor knew what he was doing in choosing this impossible sea coast—and this is probably Nabokov’s particular point—so did Shakespeare in stressing the coast of Bohemia, since it would be hard to find a more landlocked region in Europe.
3
Shakespeare rewrote geography in order to emphasize the fantastic nature of his plot—as he did also in choosing
The Winter’s Tale
for a title and in all the expressions of incredulity at the play’s close—just as, for instance, he chose to violate history for other ends by fusing classical Rome and Renaissance Italy in
Cymbeline
.
In the twentieth century the professionalization of criticism and the ever-increasing prestige of Shakespeare have led critic after critic to resurrect as virtues in this or that play what had once seemed defects. This has yielded many valuable insights, but it has also led to a working principle that Shakespeare could not make a mistake. This of course, in the schizoid world of modern criticism, where some blithely combine Freud and Marx, is not incompatible with others insisting that Shakespeare always already contradicts himself. But the widespread assumption of Shakespeare’s infallibility has often led to absurd consequences.
4