PERFECTION or perversion, or something of both? It is just over 40 years since Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published, and it remains one of the most misinterpreted of literary classics. The story of Humbert Humbert's crazed obsession with a noncommittal 12 year old girl, and the bizarre odyssey into which his fixation leads them both is comic, sad and beautifully repulsive.
This is not a love story, nor is it erotic; it is an ambiguous, multilayered lament for the loss of innocence which unfolds through shimmeringly exact prose. Near the end of the novel Humbert realises that were Lolita capable of lucid thought, she would probably be able to figure out - as he does - that whereas the playwright Clare Quilty broke her heart, he, Humbert, merely broke her life.
And let's face it, in terms of romance, the heart is far more valuable a prize than life. This is the final cruelty Nabokov visits upon his pathetic, narcissistic narrator, whose various cruelties never quite match the assortment of cruelties he endures - not that we care overly. Misfit, bully, murderer, unconvincing penitent, Humbert fails in everything. "Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonising thought that her mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert, Humbert was dreadfully unhappy.
Perhaps Nabokov's greatest achievement in the creation of this narrator, a creation which succeeds by virtue of its detachment and near complete avoidance of sentimentality, never mind true feeling, is that he demonstrates that linguistic virtuosity can - and does - suspend moral judgment. We would prefer not to admit it, but in Lolita it happens.
Humbert should disgust us; he disgusts himself. Or at least he would like to disgust himself when he announces: "I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved, you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything... And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl..." It sounds like a formal speech, not a despairing cry wrest from the gut. No other narrator shares his enduring conceitedness. "Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome man; slow moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour...
Convinced of his own brooding physical allure and characteristically cruel about the lack of beauty in others - Humbert despises ample female flesh, sneers at women, children and youths throughout the book. Tracing his madness to the loss of his own first love when he was a boy, Humbert - for all his artistic aspirations - is completely preoccupied by appearances and responds only to surface beauty.
His attempt to regain the lost nymph of his boyhood, like the wayward quest of a medieval knight, takes over his life and eventually leads to his theft of Lolita's.
For all its shocking comedy - and Lolita is hilariously funny, sustained throughout by Humbert's manic eloquence - the book is dominated by death. All the major players end up dead, even the narrator. Yet the only real tragedy is Lolita's. The novel is not tragic; neither is poor old Humbert; but the destruction of her innocence is.
Dolores Haze Humbert's fantasy girl is a tough talking little survivor, whose resilience owes a lot to her mother's active dislike. A smart talking, often bored, greedy, emotionally dead kid "oh, a squashed squirrel" - nevertheless the closest she gets to complaining is when she sulks over a cancelled swimming trip. Conscious of sitting "with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed" Humbert can report there were times when, weary of his sexual demands, she would mutter "not again" and he also heard "her sobs in the night - every night, every night" but no one can accuse her of self pity, nor is she sickly sweet.
One of the saddest comments in this sad, funny book is his observation: "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing." Their conversation consists entirely of his manipulating demands for sex. Treated like a performing animal, she is his captive, as he offhandedly recalls. "I had a cup of hot flavourless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas for my monkey, and spent another 10 minutes or so in a delicatessen store." Having entered "umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity" Lolita soon treats it with amused distaste. Nabokov is extraordinarily subtle in his portrayal of what is an empty relationship.
Having exploited the child himself, Humbert sets off to avenge himself, not Lolita, when he discovers that the oddball playwright Clare Quilty was in fact her first love. The showdown between the two is a comic duet. Considering that Humbert is accompanied by "Chum", his black pistol, Quilty - the only other character in the novel who shares the narrator's range of literary reference - seems unduly calm. Quilty and Humbert (or Guilty and Humbug) are not only a fine double act, they are mirror images of each other, brothers. Facing death, the resourceful Quilty opts for some persuasive negotiation: "Now look here Mac," he said, "You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let, us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence...
THERE are other elements: the theme of old world corruption confronting new world innocence. Few writers could claim to understand the emigre mind as well as Vladimir abokov. Humbert discovers that the American great outdoors is too physically challenging for lovers more suited to the milder traditional European pastoral setting. Yet he loves America, and regrets "thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country.
Lolita is a celebration of art, a novel of immense style, wit and, cold wisdom. It is also Nabokov's masterpiece. What a shame that Weidenfeld, its original UK publisher, is reissuing it in such a tacky film tie in edition which even leaves John Ray's name off the fictional foreword.
Born in Russia in 1899, Nabokov feed to Berlin, before arriving at Cambridge. He later returned to Berlin before moving to France for three years. In 1940 he settled in America, where he spent 15 years as an academic. The success of Lolita in 1955 made him a full time writer. By 1961 he was living in Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Such is Nabokov's art that Lolita on each new reading continues to be fresh and ever changing, defying the squalor of its central theme.
