Notes Topics 73

A so]t breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown notion of success (which confuses art with en-
Far out to sea and lost. Yet I I(now well tertainment), but also of those more professional
The bloodless wordwill battle ]or its own betrayals which take the form of wilful eccen-
Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell. tricity, academicconceit, or intellectual snobbery
The generations tell (as Mr. Cyril Connolly would say, "he never
Their personal tale: the Onehas ]ar to go
Past the mirages and the murdering snow. belonged to the literary ~lite").
I do not think Muir felt very optimistic about
the survival of his values in our doomedcivilisa-
To proclaim the victory of the bloodless word
is an act of faith; it is to assert the superiority tion. But his imagination reached beyond this
of the vita contemplativa in a world devoted to historical moment,to the cosmic revolution that
meaningless work and desperate erethism. astrologers predict, that Yeats saw in vision, and
Muir’s significance is the significance of a dedi- that even to more rational philosophers now
cated man of letters, and his life of devotion is seems inevitable and imminent.
a silent criticism not only of the conventional HerbertRead

Ona Book Entitled "Lolita"

By Vladimir Nabokov

ArTRay,
E a doing my impersonation of suave Iohn
the character in Lolita who pens the
pulse I record had no textual connection with
the ensuing train of thought, which resulted,
Foreword, any comments coming straight from however, in a prototype of my present novel, a
me may strike one--may strike me, in fact-- short story somethirty pages loiig. I wrote it in
as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov Russian, the language in which I had been
talking about his own book. A few points, writing novels since x924 (the best of these are
however, have to be discussed; and the-auto- not translated into English, and all are pro-
biographic device may induce mimic and model hibited for political reasons in Russia). The man
to blend.
Teachers of Literature are apt to think up
such problems as "What is the author’s pur-
pose?" or still worse "What is the guy trying
to say?" Now, I happen to be the kind of
T body
OOmuch about LOLITA?Almost every-
has had a say about the novel
except the author himsel[. Some years ago
author who in starting to work on a book, has no in NewYorl(, a/tee the manuscript On the
other purpose than toget rid of that book and Iorm o[ quasi-smuggled copies o{ the two-
who, when asked to explain its origin and volume paper-bacl(edParis edition) had gone
growth, has to rely on such ancient ierms as rapidly, nervously, uncertainly /rom hand to
Inter-reaction of Inspiration and Combination-- hand in the Manhattan publishing world, 1
which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explain- ast(ed Vladimir Nabol(ov/or permission
ing one trick by performing another. publish long excerpts [rom the novel in a
The first little throb of Lolita went through number o/ the ^NCHOa RI~VIEW.He agreed,
and agreed too, a/tee muchreluctance (his)
me late in x939 or early in i94 o, in Paris, at a and prodding (mine), to do a personal essay
time when I was laid up with a severe attack of "’ona bool( entitled ~.OLXTA .... "" The English
intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the publishers intend to include this in their
initial shiver of inspiration was somehow /orthcoming edition (i/ and when), and
prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in ol~er it here as a contribution,at long last, by
the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of the author himsel[ to the curious local con-
coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing troversy, that strange "’battle o/ the bool(s’"
ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed with the bool(s leIt out.--u.l.~,.
the bars of the poor creature’s cage. The im-

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74 Vtadimir Nabokov
was a Central European, the anonymous I was meek enough to stipulate that the book
nymphetwas French, and the loci were Paris be brought out anonymously.I doubtthat I shall
and-Provence. I had him marry the littie sick ever regret that soon afterwards, realising how
girl’s mother who soon died, and after a likely a mask was to betray myown cause, I
thwarted attempt to take advantage of the decided to sign Lolita. The four Americanpub-
orphan in a hotel room, Arthur (for that was ~.ishers, W,X, Y, Z, whoin turn were offered
his name) threw himself under the wheels of ~hetypescript and had their readers glance at it,
a truck. I read the story one blue-paper wartime were shockedby Lolita to a degree that even my
night to a group of friends~Mark Aldanov, waryold friend F.P. had not expected.
two social, revolutionaries, and a woman doctor;
but I was not pleased with the thing and
destroyed it sometimeafter movingto America W H ~ L E it is true that in ancient Europe,
and well into the xSth century (obvious
in x94o. examples come from France), deliberate lewd-
Around t949, in Ithaca, upstate NewYork, ness wasnot inconsistent with flashes of comedy,
the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a fine
began to plague me again. Combinationioined poet in a wantonmood,it is also true that in
inspiration with fresh zest and involved mein moderntimes the term "pornog pyra h " connotes
a new treatment of the theme, this time in mediocrity, commercialism,and certain strict
English--the language of myfirst governess in rules of narration. Obscenitymust be matedwith
St. Petersburg, circa x9o3, a Miss Rachel Home. banality because every kind of ~esthetic enjoy-
The nymphet, nowwith a dash of Irish blood, menthas to be entirely replaced by simple sexual
was really muchthe same lass, and the basic stimulation whichdemandsthe traditional word
marrying-her-mother idea also subsisted; but for direct action upon the patient. Old rigid
otherwise the thing was new and had grown in rules must be followed by the pornographer in
secret the claws and wings of a novel. order to have his patient fed the samesecurity
of satisfaction as, for example,fans of detective
stories feel--stories where, if you do not watch
T riterrupti0ns
E book developed slowly, with manyin-
and asides. It had taken me out, the real murderermayturn out to be, to the
someforty years to invent Russia and Western fan’s disgust, artistic originality (whofor in-
Europe, and nowI was faced by the task of in- stance wouldwant a detective story without a
venting America. The obtaining of such local single dialogue in it?). Thus, in pornographic
ingredients as wouldallow meto inject a modi- novels, action has to be limited to the copulation
cumof average "reality" (one of the few words of cliches. Style, structure, imageryshould never
which mean nothing without quotes) into the distract the reader fromhis tepid lust. Thenovel
brewof individual fancy, provedat fifty a much must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes.
more difficult process than it had been in the The passages in between must be reduced to
Europe of myyouth when receptiveness and re- sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest
tention were at their automaticbest. Otherbooks design, brief expositions and explanations,
intervened. Once or twice I was on the point which the reader will probably skip but must
of burning the unfinished draft and had carried knowthey exist in order not to feelcheated (a
my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the mentality stemmingfrom the routine of "true"
leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when fairy tales in childhood). Moreover,the sexual
I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of scenes in the bookmustfollow a crescendoline,
the destroyed book would haunt myfiles for with new variations, new combinations, new
the rest of mylife. sexes, and a steady increase in the numberof
Every summernay wife and I would go but- participants (in a Sade play they call the gar-
terfly hunting. The specimensare deposited at dener in), and therefore the end of the book
scientific institutions, such as the Museum of must be more replete with lewd lore than the
ComparativeZoologyat Harvard or the Cornell first chapters.
Universityeollection~ Thelocality labels pinned Certain techniques in the beginning of Lolita
under these butterflies will be a boonto some (Humbert’s Journal, for example) misled some
2xst-century scholar with a taste for recondite of myfirst readers into assumingthat this was
biography. It was at such of our headquarters going to be a lewd book. They expected the
at Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, rising succession of erotic scenes; whenthese
Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored
energetically resumed in the evenings or on and let down. This, I suspect, is one of the
cloudy days. I finished copying the thing out reasons whynot all the four firms read the type-
in longhandin the spring of ~954, and at once script to the end. Whetherthey found it porno-
began casting around for a publisher. graphic or not did not interest me.Their refusal
At first, on the advice of a waryold friend, to buy the book was based not on mytreatment

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 Notes & Topics 75
of the themebut on the themeitself, for there somecall the Literature of Ideas, which very
are at least three themeswhichare utterly taboo often is topical trash comingin huge blocks
as far as most Americanpublishers are con- of plaster that are carefully transmitted fromage
cerned. The two others are: a Negro-Whitemar- to age until somebody comes along with-a
riage.which is a complete and glorious success hammerand takes a good crack at Balzac, at
resulung in lots of children and grandchildren; Gorki, at Mann.
and the total atheist who lives a happy and Another charge which some readers have
useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age madeis that Lolita is anti-American. This is
ofxo6. somethingthat pains me considerably morethan
Someofthereactions wereveryamusing: one the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considera-
reader suggested thathisfirmmightconsider tions of depth and perspective (a suburban
publication ifI turned myLolita intoa twelve- lawn, a mountain meadow)led me to build
year-old ladandhadhimseduced by Humbert, number of North American sets. I needed a
a farmer, ina barn, amidstgaunt andaridsur- certain ekhilarating milieu. Nothing is more
roundings, allthissetforth inshort, strong, exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. But
"realistic" sentences ("Heactscrazy. Weallact in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no in-
crazy, I guess. I guess Godactscrazy." Etc.). trinsic difference betweenPalearctic manners
Although everybody should knowthatI detest and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian from
symbols andallegories (whichis duepartly to Chicagocan be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian
my old feudwithFreudianvoodooism and sense) as a duke. I chose Americanmotels in-
~ardytomyloathing
y literary mythists
ofgeneralisations
andsociologists),
devised
another-
stead of Swiss hotels or English inns only be-
cause I amtrying to be an Americanwriter and
wiseintelligent readerwhoflipped through the claim only the samefights that other American
firstpartdescribed Lolita as"OldEurope de- writers enjoy. On the other hand, mycreature
bauching young America," whileanother flipper Humbertis a foreigner and an anarchist, and
saw in it "YoungAmericadebauching old there are manythings, besides nymphets, in
Europe." Publisher X, whoseadvisers gotso which I disagree with him. Andall myRussian
boredwithHumbert that, theynever gotbeyond readers know that my old worlds--Russian,
~agex88,hadthenaivete towritemethatPart British, German,French--are just as fantastic
~wowastoolong.Publisher Y, on theother and personal as mynew one is.
hand, regretted thatthere werenogoodpeople Lest the little statement I am makinghere
inthebook. PublisherZ saidifheprinted Lolita seeman airing of grudges, I must hasten to add
heandI would gotoiail. that besides the lambswhoread the typescript
of Lolita or its OlympiaPress edition in a spirit
O W R I T I:.
N pected R in a free country
to bother about the exact should be ex-
demarca- of "Whydid he have to write it?" or "Why
should I read about maniacs?" there have been
tion betweenthe sensuous and the sensual; this a numberof wise, sensitive, and staunch people
is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot who understood my book much better than I
emulate the accuracy of judgmentof those who can explain its mechanismhere.
pose the fair young mammalsphotographed in
magazines where the general neckline is just
low enoughto provoke a past master’s chuckle E vthis
r. R v serious writer, I dare say, is awareof
or that published bookof his as of a
and just high enoughnot to makea postmaster constant comfortingpresence. Its pilot light is
frown. I presumethere exist readers whofind steadily burning somewherein the basementand
titillating the display of mural Wordsin those a meretouch applied to one’s private thermostat
hopelessly banal and enormous novels which instantly results in a quiet little explosion of
are typed out by the thumbsoftense mediocrities familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of
and called "powerful" and "stark" by the re- the book in an ever accessible remotenessis a
viewing hack. There are gentle souls whowould most companionablefeeling, and the better the
pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does book has conformedto its prefigured contour
not teach them anything. I amneither a reader and colour the ampler and smoother it glows.
nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite But evenso, there are certain points, by-roads,
JohnRay’sassertion, Lolita has no moralin tow. favourite hollows that one evokesmore eagerly
For me a work of fiction exists only in so far and enjoys moretenderly than the rest of one’s
as it affords mewhatI shall bluntly call ~esthetic book. I have not reread Lolita since I went
bliss, that is a sense of being somehow,some- through the proofs in the winter of x954 but I
where, connected with other states of being find it to be a delightful presence nowthat it
where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, quietly hangs about the house like a summer
ecstasy) is the norm. There are not manysuch day which one knows to be bright behind the
books.All the rest is either topical trash or what haze. AndwhenI thus think of Lolita, I seem

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76 Vladimir Nabokov
always to pick out for special delectation such
images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of
RamsdaleSchool, or Charlotte saying "water-
proof," or Lolita in slow motion advancingto-
wardsHumbert’sgifts, or the pictures decorating
the stylised garret of GastonGodin,or the Kas-
beambarber (who cost mea monthof work),
Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphin-
stone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable
Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital
townof the book), or the tinkling soundsof the
valley town comingup the mountain trail (on
which I caught the first known female of
Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the
nerves of the novel. Theseare the secret points,
the sublimal co-ordinates by meansof which the
bookis plotted--although I realise very clearly
that these and other scenes will be skimmed
over or not noticed, or never even reached, by
those whobegin reading the book under the im-
pression that it is something on the lines of
Memoirsoj a WomanoJ Pleasure or Les Amours
de Milord Grosvit. That mynovel does contain
various allusions to the physiological urges of a
pervert is quite true. But after all we are not
children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents,
not English public school boys who after a
night of homosexualromps have to endure the
paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated
versions.
It is childish to study a workof fiction in
order to gain information about a country or
about a social class or about the author. Andyet
one of myvery few intimate friends, after read-
ing Lolita, was sincerely worried that I (I1)
should be living "among such depressing
people"--whenthe only discomfort I really ex-
perienced was to live in my workshop among
discarded limbs and unfinished torsos.

Artbook,
r r OlympiaPress, in Paris, publishedthe
an Americancritic suggested that
Lolita was the record of mylove affair with the
romantic novel. The substitution "English lan-
guage" for "romantic novel" would make this
elegant formula more correct. But here I feel
myvoice rising to a muchtoo strident pitch.
None of my American friends have read my
Russian books and thus every appraisal on the
strength of myEnglish ones is boundto be out
of focus. Myprivate tragedy, which cannot, and
indeed shouldnot, be anybody’sconcern, is that
I had to abandon my natural idiom, my un-
trammelled,rich, and infinitely docile Russian
tongue for a second-rate brand of English, de-
void of any of those apparatuses--the baffling
mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied
associations and traditions--which the native
illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magicallyuse to
transcend the heritage in his ownway.

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 BOOKS & WRITERS

ThomasWolfe and the Kicking Season

By Pamela Hansford Johnson

T Owriter,
NX^RLV every successful and serious
either during his lifetime or within
a short but (for me) painful one on Nietzsche:
and then, one day, Loo/( Homeward Angel burst
a short period after it, there comesthe Kicking upon us like the radiance from a lighthouse
Season. This is not arranged or concerted by newly erected upon somevery sticky rocks. We
villains in committee;it just. happensbecause ate, drank, and dreamedit. Weweren’t fools.
somethingis abroadin the air, a sense that it is Wehad some taste, we knew that some of it
high time somebodygot his come-uppance,was was ,g, uff. The apostrophesof Eugene~,o Ann,
"reappraised," or simply, in his ownbest in- that ’great big beautiful Boston bitch, made
terests, given a temporarycheck. I rememberit us wriggle. But that bookspoke for us: spoke,
happening, to Hemingwaywhen Across the not in spite of its sprawlings,its bawlings,its
River and Into the Trees cameout. I detected a youthful yellings andhowlingsabout the family,
faint whiff of it--very faint--over Mr.Eliot’s last the silver cord, the "incommunicableprison of
play. The higher they rise .... Yes, one day it this earth," love itself, but because of those
will even be the turn of Scott Fitzgerald. Even things. Wewere not articulate ourselves, though
of Mr. E. M. Forster. At the moment,it is the we had muchwe wanted to say. Wolfe had far
turn of poor TomWolfe. too muchto say, but he said it with our voices.
"This manis not a novelist," wrote Mr. Cyril In the Manchester Guardian of October 3rd
Connolly, on Septemberx4th last, whena ne,w last, Mrs. Doris Lessing, that soberly diagnostic
edition of Look HomewardAngel and Wolfe s critic, wrotewith her usual sense, her usual lack
Selected Letters wereissued together,* "he is an of flummery, that Wolfe was a myth-maker:
obsessional neurotic with a gift for wordswho "He did not write about adolescence: to read
could write only about himself and whocannot him is to re-experience adolescence.... I have
create other people. He is the BenjaminRobert yet to meet a person born into any kind of
Haydon of American literature." The late Establishment whounderstood Wolfe, I have yet
EdwinMuir headedhis article, "The Pretender," to meet a provincial whohas cracked open a
and wrote, "His novels have becomealmost un- big city whodoes not acknowledgethat Wolfe
readable," quoting, to prove it, a gooddeal of expressed his own struggle for escape into
Wolfe’sold nonsenseand little of his excellence. larger experience."
In the whole of Look Homeward Angel he Andthere you haveit, pat: "the wholething,"
found only one convincingcharacter, "Elizabeth as Starwick wouldhave said.
Gant." It is odd to see her as Elizabeth. She For it is no good denyingone’s enthusiasms,
was Eliza to us. once they have been excited. There must have
By "us," I mean a group of young men and been something to back them, in proportion to
girls at the beginningof the ’thirties, either just their violence. These boys and girls I have
within or just out of their teens, reared in a spoken of didn’t even mind the rhetoric--"O
Londonsuburb, good grammarschool products, lost, and by the windgrieved, ghost, comeback
liking to roll backthe carpet in the eveningsand again..."--and it was encouraging to me to
dance, and to flow through successive crazes find a positive response to this threnody by an
for successivewriters. Whatwriters? Well, there otherwise stern youngmanin Granta, at the end
was a long run on Dostoievsky; on O’Flaherty: of last year. So he should respond, unless he
were dead already. Wedid. Wecouldn’t help it.
* Look HomewardAngel. By Tr~ora^s WOLFE. The Times Literary Supplement, in an excel-
Heinemann. 2xs. Selected Letters o/ThomasWolIe, lent middlearticle, paid Wolfethe tribute of
edited, with an Introductionby EL~ZABEXr~ NOWELL.taking him seriously, and praising wherepraise
sHeinemann,25 was due. This mentionedhis "gift of mimicry"
77

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