What Do Women Want? (10 page)

Why should I doubt that Diana
was
kind? I’m sure it never occurred to her to renounce her
whole
clothing allowance and donate it to land-mine victims so they could buy prostheses. I’m sure it never occurred to her that one pair of South Seas pearl-and-diamond earrings could fund a whole anti-land-mine charity for a year.

Then Diana made that bad career move with which many of us are familiar. She started to enjoy her freedom as a single woman, and she even went yachting with the Sheik of Araby. The golden-haired princess may indeed have been having sex with a dark-skinned Egyptian! She publicly broke the cardinal rule for golden princesses.

So even
before
Diana’s death there were signs of media backlash beginning. Did we really want an A-rab stepfather for the heir and the spare? The tabloids had a field day with Dodi-Di. Pictures were “digitally enhanced” to show “the kiss.” Diana was depicted as a mermaid of the Mediterranean, as Jackie O. had once been depicted as a mermaid of the Aegean. Ondines flashed their glittering tails, but black clouds were ominously hovering.

How could the Windsors ever be happy with the way Di had edged them all off the front pages? Di divorced was even better copy than Di married. Dodi-Di was lip-smackingly delicious. Think of the shopping sprees, the yachts, the far-flung houses. Think of the legions of designers, decorators, and jewelers who would benefit from this union! And then, suddenly, Di and Dodi died. My first thought was: Her Majesty’s Secret Service did it. But I freely admit to having a conspiratorial frame of mind.
⁶

The truth was, Di had gone as far as she could go alive. Virgins can’t
stay
virgins and they mayn’t be public whores, so they have to die. From Juliet to Sleeping Beauty, consider the fate of virgins. The kiss kills as often as it cures.

In death, the apotheosis of Diana was complete. She ascended to that realm inhabited by Marilyn Monroe, Evita Perón, Jean Harlow, Amelia Earhart, and Sylvia Plath—all dead while still young and photogenic. If there’s anything the world disdains more than uppity
young
women, it’s uppity
old
women. Dying young has
always
been a woman’s best career move.

Let’s face it: Diana’s real tragedy would have been to outlive her looks and try to make it on good works alone. Suppose she had
looked
like Mother Teresa or even Princess Anne. Imagine what sentiments the press would have favored her with. Instead they adored the icon who died at thirty-six and had the Marilyn Monroe song—“Candle in the Wind”—recycled for her.

The recycling of the song ought to remind us that the icon is stronger than the person. We needed a dead icon, we got a dead icon. After all, there is no princess like a dead princess to sell magazines.

Who knows what Diana was
really
like? She is an icon, and icons are judged largely on appearances. She
looked
kind. She was the queen of the photo op, the prime-time interview, the tabloid bestseller. Her goodness has been unquestioned.

The things Diana did for charity—attend black-tie benefits, pose for photographers—are indeed onerous (personally I
hate
both activities), but they are hardly as onerous as scrabbling for a living nine to five, sans nannies, sans chauffeurs, sans therapists. She probably was a dear girl (why should I doubt it?), and she was more empathetic than the usual Sloane Ranger, but she was, after all, still a Sloane Ranger. More curious than her own self-glorification, I find, is her glorification by everyone else.

Suppose that behind the mask there was another woman—a woman lost and confused about her role, like so many of us. She was a woman who wanted to leave the world a better place, wanted to be a good mother, a loyal wife, a private person. Diana the icon superseded this real woman. She was obliterated by the public Diana. And this is the deeper tragedy. We live in a world that so worships fame that we refuse to acknowledge how much fame distorts a person’s life. When she was too young to know what she was doing, Diana made a Faustian bargain: She gave away her privacy forever. Absorbed into that great pantheon of heroines, the sweet innocent girl she probably was hardened into iconography. Diana’s tragedy happened long before her death. It happened as soon as her face hit the tea towels. She gave up real life for being the heroine of a public soap opera. And she could never go back to being real again.

—VLADIMIR NABOKOV,
THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS

 

 

 

“Lolita is famous, not I,”
⁷
Nabokov said to one of the many interviewers who came to interrogate him after the
succès de scandale
of his most celebrated novel,
Lolita
. And like so many Nabokovian utterances, it was both true and the mirror image of true. Lolita’s fame made her creator both a “brand-name” author—to use that distressing contemporary locution—and an adjective. Very few writers become adjectives. Joyce begat Joycean. Dickens begat Dickensian. Henry James begat Jamesian. Yet writers as unique as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe did not become adjectives—perhaps because they are inimitable. All through my twenties I tried to write Nabokovian novels, but even I would be hard put to define the term. Novels full of doppelgängers, mirror images, and obscure words were what I yearned to create. When I found my voice, it proved the opposite of Nabokovian. I was doomed to be forthright and direct where Nabokov was labyrinthine, but I never lost my affection for Nabokov.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, alias V. Sirin (Volodya to his friends), born on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1899, became famous in 1958-59, at the fairly ripe age of sixty, through the notoriety of his fictive daughter Lolita, Dolly, Lo, Dolores Haze, of the soft brown puppy-body and equivalently gamy aroma.

Like most famous literary books,
Lolita
seduced the world for the wrong reasons. It was thought to be dirty. It has this in common with Joyce’s
Ulysses,
Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer,
D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
It won its first passionate proponents by being banned. When it came to wide public consciousness, it was reputed to be a scandalous book about a scandalous subject: the passion of an aging roué for a twelve-year-old girl.

Since my literary debut was also steeped in scandal, I know intimately the ambivalent feelings of an author who gains wide fame and commercial acceptance through a misunderstanding of motives. Much as any writer craves the acceptance conferred by bestsellerdom, it is bittersweet to win this by being thought a pervert. Such ambivalence alone explains Nabokov’s mocking reference to
Lolita
’s fame. Nabokov knew that he had been toiling in the vineyards of the muse since adolescence. The public did not know. Nabokov knew that he had translated
Alice in Wonderland
into Russian. The public did not know. With eleven extraordinary novels, a study of Gogol, an autobiography, numerous short stories, poems, and translations behind him, the author of
Lolita
was hardly a literary novice. His identity as a novelist, poet, and literary scholar had been honed and polished in three languages since he had had his poems privately printed in Saint Petersburg at the age of fifteen. He had certainly endured more terrible traumas than sudden fame. Fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution and escaping Europe with a Jewish wife in 1940 tend to make the publication of a scandalous book seem trivial. The generous, amused, self-mocking way Nabokov reacted to
Lolita
’s stardom contains within it all the paradoxes of a career rich in paradoxes, a career that seems to have the very symmetry and irony of the novels themselves.

It is almost superfluous to introduce
Lolita
—even on her thirtieth
⁸
birthday—because Nabokov, who thought an author should control the world of his book with godlike authority, anticipated all the possible front (and rear) matter any reader could wish for. We have the mock introduction by “John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.,” a spoof on scholarly psychobabble and tendentious moralizing—two things Nabokov detested as much as he detested Freudian symbol-mongering in literary criticism. As he often said to his students and interviewers: “Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. . . . Beware the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint.” Since he wrote to achieve what he called “aesthetic bliss,” since he believed that a literary work inhered in “the divine details,” he would want his readers to “caress the details” in his own work as he, as a teacher of literature, taught his students to caress the details in Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Kafka, Flaubert, and Proust. His impersonation of “John Ray” in the foreword to
Lolita
is one of the most delicious of literary parodies, and his own afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita” is, I believe, the last word on the subject of the sensual versus the pornographic. I always wonder why it is not quoted more often in those endless, predictable, and anesthetizing debates that go on about the nature of pornography and eroticism (to which I am inevitably invited).

Here is Nabokov on that dreary subject:

 

 

Tepid lust, indeed. Those who can’t tell the difference between masturbatory stimulation and imaginative literature deserve, I believe, the garbage they get. The erection of small dorsal hairs is the issue here and not, as is commonly assumed, other sorts of tumescence.

Nabokov thought of
Lolita
as his best novel in English, and he had been trying to write it at least since his German expatriate days. Perhaps the literary artist is born, like a woman with all her eggs present in their follicles; they have only to ripen and burst forth—and ripeness is all. But sometimes it takes half a lifetime for them to ripen. Nabokov began what was to become
Lolita
as a novella in Russian called
The Enchanter
(
Volshebnik
), which he composed in the fall of 1939 in Berlin. It was his last work in Russian and his last work written in Europe before he, his wife, Vera, and his son, Dmitri, emigrated to America in 1940.

In
The Enchanter,
all the elements of
Lolita
are present: the lustful Central European lover with a whiff of madness, the nymphet who is aware yet unaware of her charms, and the marrying-her-mother theme. In
The Enchanter,
however, it is the nymphet’s unnamed lover (who in
Lolita
becomes Humbert) who is killed by a truck, not the nymphet’s mother. Nabokov claims he destroyed
The Enchanter
soon after moving to America; but his memory apparently misled him, for the novella turned up in his files and was published in 1986. It seems a pale foreshadowing of
Lolita,
interesting as a cartoon for a future masterpiece. What is most fascinating is how the theme obsessed Nabokov until he finally got it right—the mark of a real artist. Sometimes one cannot write a certain book because all the elements for it are not yet in place: Life has to catch up with art, providing the flora and fauna of the fictive world.

One of the many glories of
Lolita
is the evocation of the American landscape, American slang, American teenagers of the fifties—all seen with the freshness only a twice-exiled European would bring. The difference between
The Enchanter
and
Lolita
is the difference between a postcard of Venice and a Turner painting of the same scene—and it inheres in the divine details. Even before
The Enchanter
was written, the idea for
Lolita
was present in Nabokov’s imagination. In
The Gift
(
Dar
), Nabokov’s autobiographical Russian novel (published serially in Berlin in 1937-38, and in its entirety in 1952 in New York) there exists this premonition of
Lolita: