Stalking Nabokov (56 page)

Not only on that, some might say. There is one other relevant change in the Russian—where, as Gennady Barabtarlo shows, dates have several times been supplied where there were none in the original.
¹⁸
In the English edition, Humbert, after finding it impossible to trace Lolita’s abductor, begins a new chapter: “This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called ‘
Dolorès Disparue
,’ there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed” (255). In the Russian the last thirteen words become “podrobnoe opisanie poslednikh trekh pustikh let, ot nachala iiulia 1949 do serediny noiabria 1952, ne imelo by smysla [a detailed description of the last three empty years, from the beginning of July 1949 to the middle of November 1952, would make no sense]” (234). Alexander Dolinin cites this in support of his theory, as proof that there was nothing but blankness—no meeting with Lolita, no encounter with Quilty—in Humbert’s life from Lolita’s disappearance until this point near the end of his writing his book. Humbert is, “therefore, at home, at his writing desk but not in a cell awaiting trial, as he has tried to convince his gullible readers.”
¹⁹
But if this were a major piece of evidence in the reading that Nabokov wanted to imprint on his book, why did he then not transfer it back into the
Annotated Lolita
when he incorporated corrections there that he saw as necessary in the Russian?

If the probability of a mistake in Nabokov’s numerals seems high from the first, the improbability of the revisionist view seems overwhelming. Even a reader unaware of Nabokov’s capacity for error will see an immediate objection to the revisionist theory: what of John Ray Jr.’s foreword? The November 16 date for Humbert’s death, on which the whole case rests, comes from Ray, but Ray also confirms just what the case tries to deny—what Dolinin denies outright—that Humbert was in prison awaiting trial when he finished his manuscript and promptly died. Tekiner suggests that—since, presumably, Ray does not explicitly mention that Humbert’s trial is for murder—the trial could be for his treatment of Lolita. But Ray declares that “references to ‘H.H”s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952” (6). There is nothing here or anywhere else in the foreword to imply that the inquisitive will find that the newspaper accounts utterly contradict Humbert’s.
²⁰

In his long discussion of the implications of the “fifty-six days,” Dolinin, of course, refers to the “November 16” date from which the countback starts, but curiously he never mentions the person who supplies that date and never addresses Ray’s assumption that Humbert’s story coincides with the known facts of the case, the details of the murder listed even in the newspapers. But to ignore evidence does not make it go away.

Connolly at least takes note of the conflicting evidence, even if only to will it into oblivion when he suggests that Humbert may have invented Ray’s foreword.
²¹
But if that is the case, then of course Humbert does not die on November 16, 1952, and there is no firm date from which to count back fifty-six days, and the discrepancy on which the whole case rests becomes nonexistent or meaningless.

Nabokov intended to indicate that Humbert died just after putting the last words to his manuscript. That is why he supplied the number of days
Lolita
took Humbert to compose, why he has Dr. Ray supply the date of Humbert’s death, and why he explains in his interview with Alfred Appel Jr. that in Humbert’s final paragraph he meant “to convey a constriction of the narrator’s sick heart, a warning spasm causing him to abridge names and hasten to conclude his tale before it was too late” (437). If there is a discrepancy between the number of days
Lolita
took Humbert to write and the number of days until Humbert’s death, that seems an error all too easy to make. Either Nabokov simply used the wrong starting point, counting from September 22 (Humbert’s receipt of the letter), the one concrete date given in the novel’s concluding sequence of events, rather than from September 25 (the murder), which has to be inferred from the text, or he counted correctly but he—or the typesetter—put “November 16” rather than the intended “November 19” for Humbert’s death, making no more than the very common slip of 6 for 9. If the text now read “November 19,” the argument for Humbert’s having invented the last fifty pages of
Lolita
would immediately collapse. Surely it is too much to base a major reinterpretation of a novel on a single typographic character?

Nabokov always aims for exactitude. He does not allow us simply to lean on evidence, as the revisionists have to do; he makes it click into place. He has made a mistake in the dating, but what he has tried to do has his customary precision and point. Humbert admits that he has “wanted,” as he says in his final paragraph, just as he feels his heart twitch, “to exist at least a couple of months longer” (311) than Quilty. In fact, since he will have only a few more hours or even minutes, he will have outlasted Quilty by fifty-six days, or eight weeks: exactly two lunar months, but still just short of two strict calendar months. Playful Aubrey McFate, as it were,
pretends
to grant Humbert the two months he had asked for, then cuts him short, denying even that small request. That is the very exact, very Nabokovian irony of these final dates, except that somewhat—but not completely—uncharacteristically, and all too humanly, he has made a slight error.

I would not have written this article if only one critic had proposed the revisionist hypothesis. I would have stopped here if two or three had propelled me into print. But with six already advancing the argument, another thinking about doing so, and others inclined to entertain it, I will continue.

Dr. Ray’s foreword records that Mrs. Richard Schiller dies in childbirth in Gray Star, “a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (6). How has she reached there, if Humbert does not respond to her letter that says, “I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska” (268)? Why does Nabokov in the afterword think of Gray Star as “the capital town of the book” (318) if Lolita does not die there in childbirth? (Gray Star, presumably, is Juneau, Alaska’s capital, in allusion to the old cartographic convention of stars for capital cities but also a play on Juno, the goddess of marriage.) If Ray’s foreword is accepted—and to repeat, if it is not, “November 16” disappears as evidence and takes with it the whole revisionist argument—it explicitly or implicitly confirms Lolita’s letter, Humbert’s visit to her, Quilty’s murder, and Humbert’s composing the manuscript in prison while awaiting trial for the killing, all the things the revisionists try to discredit.

So too does
Lolita: A Screenplay
.

While the screenplay reinvents minor details of the novel, its main alterations seem designed precisely to convey what Nabokov regarded as crucial to the novel but likely to be lost without considerable adaptation.
²²
First, and most important, Quilty’s shadowy presence throughout the novel, which readers can discover only after Humbert has himself dropped the name, is signaled in the screenplay by opening with a flash forward to the murder scene and by then making him more prominent, once the narrative returns to the beginning, from the time of Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale (at the school dance, where Quilty is presented as author of
The Nymphet
; at the Enchanted Hunters, where he is named as the drunken guest; at Beardsley School, where he is again named as author of
The Enchanted Hunters
). Second, Nabokov stresses the Edgar Allan Poe allusions, at the cost of some strain, through Humbert’s scholarly work and sometimes even Lolita’s schooling. Third, as frame to and external commentator on Humbert’s confession, John Ray Jr. becomes the sometimes comically obtrusive narrator of the whole film.

Humbert cannot narrate the film, as he does the book, for his utter ignorance of the identity of Lolita’s abductor until the end is still crucial to the story. In the novel, he could introduce Quilty’s presence and yet keep his identity hidden until the right moment, thereby having the satisfaction of keeping the reader in the darkness he had himself found so unlaughable. In the film, he could not be the narrator and allow Quilty to be seen on screen without repeatedly disclosing his present awareness of Quilty’s role. By removing Humbert from the narration of the film and flashing forward right at the beginning to the murder, Nabokov alerts us to the identity of Humbert’s foe from the start and therefore makes us vividly aware, whenever we later catch sight of Quilty, of Humbert’s failure to recognize his rival until the very end.

The screenplay opens with Lolita telling Humbert where Quilty lives—showing him, in fact, a magazine photograph of Pavor Manor, which then comes to life as Humbert arrives and promptly, wordlessly, kills Quilty. Immediately afterward, the camera cuts to:

Dr. John Ray
, a psychiatrist, perusing a manuscript on his desk. He swings around toward us in his swivel chair.

Dr. Ray: I’m Dr. John Ray. Pleased to meet you. This here is a bundle of notes, a rough autobiography, poorly typed, which Mr. Humbert Humbert wrote after his arrest, in prison, where he was held without bail on a charge of murder, and in the psychopathic ward for observation. Without this document his crime would have remained unexplained.

(
LAS
2–3)

After Ray explains that Humbert’s memoir is “mainly an account of his infatuation with a certain type of very young girl,” the camera cuts to
Humbert’s Cell in The Tombs

He is writing at a table. Conspicuous among the reference books at his elbow are some tattered travel guides and maps. Presently his voice surfaces as he rereads the first sentences of his story.

Humbert’s voice: I was born in Paris forty dark years ago…

(3–4)

Obviously, there are differences, but they seem designed primarily to make the major effects of the novel possible on the screen. Dr. Ray exists objectively before our eyes, and he describes Humbert’s composing the manuscript in prison after committing murder (he does not explicitly specify Quilty as murder victim: does this leave a loophole for the desperate revisionist?). By indicating Humbert’s reference books, Nabokov establishes his character’s effort at reliability in retelling his past. And he lets us see the murder
before
Humbert sets down his story, even lets us see Quilty asleep in Pavor Manor before Humbert first appears on screen, before Humbert reaches the manor. The murder, unequivocally, is not a product of Humbert’s narration.

The scene of Humbert’s reading Lolita’s letter, of which the revisionists make a great deal, is replaced by a parallel scene in the screenplay. Understandably, Nabokov has excised Rita from the screenplay as an unnecessary complication and instead shows Humbert, after he loses Lolita and all trace of her abductor’s trail, teaching once again at Beardsley College. There he meets Mona Dahl, who quizzes him—years have passed—about Lolita. As Nabokov notes after this scene in an explanatory aside unimpeachably immune from revisionist skepticism: “It should now have been established that Mona has had a letter from Lolita, apparently asking her to find out if it is safe for her, Lolita, to write to Humbert” (198). Humbert picks up his mail at the university post office and heads straight to an examination he is to invigilate. He opens the letter, hears, just as in the novel “a small, matter-of-fact, agonizingly familiar, voice” (199)—and after reading through Lolita’s letter, he dashes, dazed, from the exam room.

In the novel, Humbert prepares for his unpreparedness for Lolita’s letter with the great passage about endowing “our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear” (267). Obviously, something new is needed for the screenplay both to prepare us for the surprise and to show Humbert’s unpreparedness: hence the device of introducing Mona’s questions, whose import we can see but Humbert cannot, and Humbert’s blandly opening the letter (“from a Mrs. Richard Schiller—some graduate student, I presume” [198], he had moaned in the mailroom) in the midst of the examination. And just as the novel stresses the shocked suddenness of Humbert’s response—he leaves without even waking Rita from her solid morning sleep—so does the screenplay, when Humbert lurches away from his post as invigilator. For all the changes in the treatment of Lolita’s letter, Nabokov has sought cinematic ways of stressing its credibility and of eliciting the same key responses in us and in Humbert.

Humbert heads for Coalmont, where the screenplay closely follows the novel. As soon as he finds Quilty’s name from Lolita, ascertains that she will never return to him, and heads off to find Pavor Manor, the screenplay’s visual action ends, as Dr. Ray’s voiceover explains that

Poor Lolita died in childbed a few weeks later, giving birth to a stillborn girl, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remote Northwest. She never learned that Humbert finally tracked down Clare Quilty and killed him. Nor did Humbert know of Lolita’s death when shortly before his own dissolution he wrote in prison these last words of his tragic life’s story:

Humbert’s voice (
clear and firm
):… While the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blest matter as I am. I can still talk to you and make you live in the minds of later generations. I’m thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita