Thalia Huntley

Just let me get this out of the way before anything else, I know this isn’t the most cheerful subject to use as my first post of the new year. I know. But it’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks, and I felt the need to write about it.

First, my title isn’t so much an homage to The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” as it is my own way of not directly referring to the novel’s real title because I. Am. So. Disgusted. I didn’t want it to be the heading of this post, and frankly, if there were such a thing as scrubbing this book from my brain, I’d have done it and called it a day.

I had a hard time admitting to myself that I really hated this book for reasons beyond the obviously challenging subject material, particularly because I keep circling back to how much I hate this subject material. Lolita reads like a pedophile’s handbook on how to justify your…predilections…and still come off likeable. Worse, it’s practically a masturbatory aid for those inclined to be sexually attracted to children. The more I read, the more Nabokov’s prose begged me to like Humbert. It’s educated and smooth, and exceptionally purple, in the way that a European with a distaste for American culture (particularly the 1950s and 60s culture that emerged from the Post-War economic boom, when this book takes place) would want to be praised by the same American culture for his urbane manners. Those who aren’t paying the kind of attention that I did would probably fall for it. I almost did, except that there’s a distinct flavor of condescension to go with all that eggplant prose. He even throws in some French phrases to further provide the impression that he’s worldly and intelligent. He wants to impress his readers. He wants his readers to forget that he’s a pedophile and understand that he’s really a good guy.

A good guy? Is a man over thirty who can’t stop fantasizing about young girls, to the point that he invents his own term for them, a good guy? Is a man who spends his time in children’s parks watching and dreaming about all the “nymphets” around him a good guy? Well, sure, because up to now, he hasn’t actually touched any of them. They weren’t in any danger, right? The protagonist, Humbert Humbert, calls himself “a law-abiding poltroon.” Let me just say, with some vomit threatening to choke me, that he’s technically right. When he’s in public view of others, when there are potential witnesses, when there is a chance he could be admonished for what he understands the rest of society believes to be wrong, he behaves himself and he doesn’t touch the girls. But make no mistake here, he still wants to. We can get philosophical all night about whether someone who wants to commit a crime but doesn’t is still a criminal. I understand the desire to want to put someone you know is a bad person in their heart behind bars before anyone gets hurt. But let me also say that this book was written in the main character’s own perspective, from jail. So we know off the bat that he’s done something wrong, actually committed an illegal act. We don’t find out what this act was until later, but we know he did something wrong. So no, he’s not a good guy.

Humbert fancies himself a hero, mainly for his ability to resist the temptation of the nymphets so far. Just to clarify, “nymphet” is his own invented term for girls between the ages of nine and fourteen, who can only be fully appreciated by men over thirty, in Humbert’s opinion, and they are especially possessed of a particular, un-nameable quality that makes these girls just a little bit…more. They seem to evoke sexual desire from men without trying, and they seem to have a sexual prowess that has to be inborn, as these girls are all virgins. Humbert compares the girls without these qualities to be the pure Eve, and his nymphets, the girls he really wants, to Lilith. (Ugh. There’s that vomit again.) He sits on this park bench and makes up fantasies around the girls he sees, imagining games for them to play, ways he can ingratiate himself into their lives.

Here’s what makes this so challenging as a reader. Nabokov is clearly handing us a challenging subject: the justifiability of child rape. Should we praise his writing for its skill and adept ways at convincing us to like his main character? Or does he intend for his more discerning readers to see through the prose and hate a man who is so vile as to praise himself not only for his taste in girl-children, but also for his ability to resist their allure? Because, spoilers, he doesn’t keep resisting for much longer. There’s a reason why the book is called Lolita and not Humbert. It’s because he finds himself a nymphet he can’t resist. No, not just A nymphet, THE nymphet. THE girl he can’t stay away from, can’t stop thinking about, can’t stop from violating her in every way that makes the rest of us cringe all the way down our spines. And that girl’s name is, you guessed it, Lolita. Dolores, actually. Or Lo, as she’s known around her mother’s boarding house.

Skipping to the part where he actually meets his Lolita, Humbert has left Paris with his wife (That’s right. He’s married. More on her later.) for America in the 1939 (the book was first published in 1955), at the behest of a recently-deceased uncle’s will, which stipulates that Humbert will inherit money if he comes to America and takes part in the uncle’s business. Humbert’s wife, an adult woman who bears a certain level of appealing innocence in Humbert’s estimation of her, doesn’t want to go to America, but she does it anyway. This winds up working out for her because she meets a Russian cab driver in New York and they leave Humbert’s ass in the dust. He only married her because he wanted to make himself seem more respectable to other adults, so as to help hide his true desire for little girls. He even makes love to this wife, however infrequently, although he’s not attracted to her, and when she tells him she’s leaving him, he imagines killing her and her new beau, if only because he doesn’t want anyone else to want the woman that he doesn’t want. Even to adults, this guy is a real piece of shit. Humbert is in and out of mental institutions, where he, again, uses that superior European intellect to subtly poke fun at his American psychiatrists, making them think he’s homosexual, making them think he has other afflictions than the ones he really has. The guy won’t even take his recovery seriously, so how the hell am I to be expected to take his narrative seriously as the reader? Is that where Nabokov wants to challenge his readers? Or is this simply another case of a writer pretending to be truly creative when really he’s just writing himself into the book? My inability to trust the narrator of this frequently gag-inducing book makes me seriously question Nabokov’s own personal predilections because of the almost-pornographic way he describes these little girls.

Back to Humbert, eventually he makes his way to upstate New York, anticipating living with a family where there is a young girl in residence. He hasn’t even met her and yet fancies her a nymphet, alternately worrying that she might not be a nymphet and he’d be stuck in some family’s home with no nymphet to drool over. This plan falls through after Humbert has already given up his apartment in the city and is too committed to this move to back out, forcing him to go instead to live at a boarding house. Yep, the one I mentioned earlier. Enter, Lolita. Humbert is so taken with this girl, his “hot downy darling,” that he starts a diary about her, using a code to try and obscure his and Lo’s identity. Unluckily for Dolores/Lo/Lolita, her mother, Mrs. Haze, is exactly the kind of pretentious American Humbert hates for the simple fact that Mrs. Haze is pretending at just about everything. She pretends her sense of culture, her level of education, her knowledge of other languages, all of which compound Humbert’s disgust for the woman, and because she is his landlady, he keeps these thoughts to himself. But that doesn’t stop Mrs. Haze from fawning all over her new, European tenant, angling to get that ring on her finger ASAP, much to Humbert’s chagrin. Yet he invents ways to spend time with Lolita by injecting himself into her mother’s path. Mr. Harold E. Haze, Dolores/Lolita Haze’s father, is already dead, and Humbert blesses him for having already died. Part of me really likes watching Humbert so uncomfortable around the mother while simultaneously putting himself next to her at every turn so as to be close to Lolita in an acceptable scenario. I really just want Humbert to suffer.

Flashing forward a bit, there’s supposed to be a day trip to the lake and for whatever reason or other, it keeps getting pushed back. It’s supposed to be Humbert, the mother, and Lolita, and Humbert can barely contain his excitement at getting to see Lolita in a swimsuit. He’s inventing in his twisted mind ways he’ll be able to touch her, like helping her with sunscreen. (I swear, this vomit just keeps jumping up on me.) Eventually, though, the lake trip happens, and bonus, Lolita brings along one of her friends, who is also a nymphet, in Humbert’s opinion, and he spends the day fantasizing about them both. Later in the year, Lolita gets sent to a summer camp, and Humbert spends the time lamenting that he’s going to be without the company of his precious Lolita. BTW, he’s secretly ejaculated on her at this point without her noticing, as well as come in his pants under cover of his bathrobe while she sits with him on the couch, also without her knowing. Here’s where his claims of being “law-abiding” start to break down.

Skipping to the meat of the story, which has taken way too long to get to in the novel’s structural sense, Lolita leaves for summer camp, but not before kissing Humbert on the mouth and then running back to the car that will take her away from him. Meantime, Lolita’s mother is seemingly victorious in her designs to win Humbert’s hand, securing a marriage proposal from the lech. But she finds his Lolita diary, the one he tried to encode, but she knows who and what it’s about. Rather than being angry that he’s a pedophile with designs of his own on her daughter, she rails about the unfairness and blames Lolita for turning his head. Yeah, the only sympathetic character in this whole book is Lolita herself, which is perhaps Nabokov’s whole point about not being able to trust or even like the narrator. You might be beginning to see why I find this work so challenging, because I can’t tell whether Nabokov is a literary genius, or a semi-pedophilic, Euro-trash asshole who likes to deride Americans while simultaneously praising the country of America.

Anyway, the mother get hits by a car and dies, leaving Lolita an orphan. Rather than arranging a funeral or just straight up leaving the area and going to live out the rest of his poltroon life, Humbert goes to the camp where Lolita still doesn’t know her mother is dead, and kidnaps her. Yep. Here we come to the criminal part of the story. The part we all knew was coming, the part we watched unfold with each gag-inducing incident, helpless to stop it. Although, I suppose not continuing to read the book would have been a way of stopping it, but then again, we’d still know that the words were on the page. These events happened, fictionally or not, by simply existing on the printed page. Close the book and walk away, but somewhere deep in your mind, you know that Humbert is going to eventually rape this twelve-year-old girl, because you’ve known from the beginning that he’s writing his testimony from a jail cell. So here it comes. He kidnaps Lolita and manages to abstain from hurting her for a little while, but not for long. He takes her in a car around the country, never staying in one place too long or going anywhere particularly populated because he fears that she will run away from him. He takes her to the Enchanted Hunters hotel (Who does Nabokov think he’s kidding with this joke name? Really?) and many, many others. Eventually Humbert does rape Lolita, though he would have us believe that she seduced him. He buys her things and clothes and uses all manner of distractions to keep her from realizing she should hate him and run to the first police officer she can find, and it works for a while. Even Humbert, much later in the book, describes their time together as a “world of total evil.” He knows he’s scum, but he can’t stop himself from wanting and hurting Lolita. Eventually, though, Lolita does manage to escape him. But where? Humbert has no clue, and he despairs.

Now, I haven’t brought it up before now because it hasn’t really mattered much to the story until now, but there is a playwright that gets mentioned several times in the book before Lolita runs away. Humbert keeps bringing up little connections to this playwright, Clare Quilty, cousin or uncle or nephew or whatever to the dentist that the Haze family uses, for various reasons. Quilty is possibly the family of the dentist, whom we meet almost at the end of the book, and he’s Lolita’s favorite playwright. He writes for children, mainly, but in such a way as to suggest to Humbert that Quilty is a fellow pedophile. Turns out he is, and he is who Lolita runs to when she escapes Humbert. Humbert discovers this after revisiting all 342 hotels across the country where he and Lolita stayed, and he learns that her second abductor had been following them for a while. In this time without Lolita, Humbert gets married to another woman, young, but an adult nonetheless. Her name is Rita, and they wander the country together, until Rita gets paranoid that Humbert will leave her, so she leaves him first. When Humbert is visiting Rita, he finds out that Lolita has written him a letter, addressing him as “Dad.” She tells about how she’s married and pregnant, and asks him for money, but she won’t give the address because she’s afraid he’ll be angry with her. Of course, Humbert contacts her and they meet. He gives her four thousand dollars, and they talk. Basically, he wants to reassure himself that he didn’t completely destroy her life, and she sort of reassures him. Chick has a decidedly twisted view of the world and how things are supposed to work between healthy humans, and who can really blame her? It’s not as if any remotely healthy behaviors were ever modeled for her.

Back to Quilty. Humbert brings a gun to his meeting with Lolita because he thinks that her husband is the one who abducted her from him, and he plans to kill the husband. Then he finds out from Lolita that her actual abductor was Quilty, so Humbert goes to Quilty’s home, intending to kill him. Quilty really lives on a kind of pedophile haven, and Lolita tells Humbert that Quilty was the great love of her life, despite the fact that all his friends who lived on the ranch with him had some weird sexual appetites as well. I forgot to mention before now that Humbert has blamed all his misfortunes not on his own bad decisions, but on a nameless, faceless force he half-jokingly calls “McFate,” which is obviously meant to be a derogation of an Americanized version of real Fate, which is, in his mind, responsible for all the bad things that have happened to him. This narrator simultaneously takes responsibility and absolves himself of guilt, using McFate when it’s convienient and then castigating himself for ruining Lolita’s life. Again, can’t tell if Nabokov is a literary genius or self-congratulating d-bag who thinks he’s clever and elevated enough to mock Americans with their own judicial sense of right and wrong without them noticing. So Humbert is at Quilty’s home, intending to confront him and kill him for taking away his precious Lolita, and Quilty basically laughs at him, thinking that he can distract Humbert with clever wordplay. Humbert literally reads a poem about Quilty’s crimes to Quilty while holding a gun on him, and what does Quilty do? He starts to criticize the poem! Humbert must seriously be one of the least threatening people on earth if he can hold a gun on someone and they don’t really sweat it. Comically, Quilty finally starts to run through the house trying to escape, gets shot multiple times, and still doesn’t die. Finally Humbert kills him, and that’s what he winds up going to jail for. Not the kidnapping, the rape, not any of the rest of Humbert’s many, many crimes, but the murder of a fellow pedophile. The really funny part, though, is that there are other people in Quilty’s house, and Humbert goes and confesses to having just killed the man, and literally no one gives a crap.

But Humbert leaves the house and gets arrested for running a red light, and it is only after he’s in jail that he realizes he’s ruined Lolita’s life by kidnapping and raping her. He says he should be sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for the rape only and absolves himself of every other wrongdoing. Doesn’t care about the kidnapping, doesn’t care about the murder, doesn’t care about any of the rest of it, just that he ruined his precious nymphet’s life and stole her childhood.

Frankly, the whole book is a masturbatory salutation to other pedophiles, and I think it is ultimately trash. This main character is intelligent, well-spoken, worldly, and a lover of children. He exalts and degrades himself, he idolizes and praises the innocence of these girls, only wanting them while they’re pure, and he knows that what he’s doing is wrong. So is Nabokov using a particularly controversial subject (I say controversial because his narrator justifies himself and his proclivities by citing the practice of child brides, which, sadly, is still a problem to this very day, as a valid form of marriage.) to point out the hypocritical pseudo-intellectualism of Post-War American society? That regardless of the man’s pedophilic inclinations, we should still strive for his approval because he’s European and therefore smarter? Nabokov kind of backs us into a corner with this book. If we like the prose and praise the structure, the character development, all the technical things that would, under different subject matter, make the book great, are we being willfully ignorant of the grave violations committed by Humbert Humbert in a pragmatic and misguided attempt not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater? If we hate the book for its exaltations of this pedophilic monster, are we then being overly dismissive of the skill with which the book is actually written?

I’ve decided that I don’t care. This book made me cringe, it made me angry, it made me hate. I hated the prose for its attempt to cover the sins committed, I hated the sins, I hated the sinners, and I hated the author. The whole thing made me feel as though I was being mocked. Mocked for my intellect, mocked for my education, mocked for being American, and mocked for my morals. Well, Nabokov can, figuratively because he’s already dead, go fuck himself.