venus febriculosa

After perusing Dieter Zimmer’s exhaustive online exhibit, Covering Lolita (see sidebar),  I am disappointed, as interesting as the various depictions of Lolita are, by how very few correspond thematically to the novel. Nabokov’s work is masterful in its clarity and overflows with powerful and finely-wrought imagery and yet so few of the covers attempt to capture any of this richness, and many of them are merely absurd, or banal or a laughable combination of both. There are, as is to be expected, the Balthus and Balthus-like images, not to mention other examples of fine art maidens drafted to portray poor Lolita, and there is of course a panoply of expected lolipops, Sue Lyon -and to a lesser extent Dominique Swain – photos,  body parts (lips, legs, breasts), short white socks, saddle shoes, Mary Janes, short skirts, an endless parade of hairstyles, and the too-old Lolitas and the too-young Lolitas. Then there are the butterflies, and the images of the author, and an entire universe of typefaces.  

So Venus febriculosa is holding a Lolita book cover competition. The winning entry will receive $350. Deadline is October 2. Rules (pdf):

Lolita Book Cover Contest Rules

“…if am walking through the city and look into one of the quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last…And might it not be…that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time…?”

So, how shall we read Lolita and what may we learn in the reading? Leland de la Durantaye’s elegant theses revolve primarily around these questions. In particular, I respond to the clarity of the following passage, which reduces the novel to something conceptually more incisive than “Humbert Humbert, narrator of ‘Lolita‘, is a sadist, narcissist and sexual deviant”, (from the title of Martin Amis’ 1992 review of Lolita in The Independent):

“Entranced by his senses and pursuing his image of Lolita as if she were an inspiring image of art, Humbert fails to see that “there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a place gate.” These “dim and adorable regions” are forbidden to him because of the intensity and the single-mindedness with which he occludes them, with which he concentrates on “another Lolita,” an “image” created in his sensual haze that his desperation and desire lead him to call “more real” than the little girl in his charge. In this, Nabokov has Humbert fail to observe the line that divides art from life – that same line that Nabokov’s compatriot Khodasevich identified decades before Lolita as lying at the heart of the burgeoning writer’s aesthetics.

In works early and late – and nowhere more spectacularly than Lolita – Nabokov asked how the artist was to live in the world, how to balance fierce independence of vision with the necessity of seeing the world from the standpoint of others. This is a question of judgment: the question of how to balance the aesthetic with the ethical, the disinterested remove of aesthetic judgment with the interested proximity of moral judgment.”

Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press, was the first to publish Lolita. In September 1965 the Evergreen Review (Evergreen #37)  published an article by Girodias entitled Lolita, Nabokov and I, which was Girodias’ accounting of the events surrounding the publication of Nabokov’s novel. What followed was a exchange, in Evergreen #45 and #47 between the always clever Nabokov and Girodias (Links below).

Nabokov:

“I had not been in Europe since 1940, was not interested in pornographic books, and thus knew nothing about the obscene novelettes which Mr. Girodias was hiring hacks to confect with his assistance, as he relates elsewhere. I have pondered the painful question whether I would have agreed so cheerfully to his publishing Lolita had I been aware in May, 1955, of what formed the supple backbone of his production. Alas, I probably would, though less cheerfully.”

“But I must also point out to him that he was not the right person to undertake the thing; he lacked the means to launch Lolita properly – a book that differed so utterly in vocabulary, structure, and purpose (or rather absence of purpose) from his other much simpler commercial ventures, such as Debby’s Bidet or Tender Thighs.”

http://www.evergreenreview.com/100/nabokov.html

Girodias:

“Then – not everyone has the privilege of acceding during one’s lifetime to Nabokov’s inverted Pantheon! Nabokov’s victims have always been anonymous, at best pseudonymous: am I really the first of the great man’s fantasies of hate to be identified with a live person?

Am I really – could I really be! – that delirious, evil character, that chameleonic tormentor? Draped in “an aura of negligence, evasiveness, procrastination and falsity,” did I conspire to capture my helpless, struggling Nabokov in “a tissue of haggling manoeuvres and abstruse prevarications“? Did I haunt him in dark recesses “with the sneer of a hoodlum following an innocent passerby“? As a “flexible memoirist” (animated with “undulatory motions“), was I guilty of those countless “insolent and vulgar remarks,” those “idiotic insinuations” peppered with “nasty and silly passages” and freely disgorging “discrepancies typical of apocrypha,” not to mention the mere “guileful inexactitudes“? (Unless otherwise occupied in concocting “obscene novelettes” in the company of snivelling hacks – couched, that goes without saying, “in intolerably bad English”?) How far can one go? Could that remarkable person be me? Would those darkest “depths of my personality” be the cause of Nabokov’s “obligation to endure the elusiveness, the procrastination (sic…), the dodges, the duplicity, and the utter irresponsibility of the man“?”

http://www.evergreenreview.com/100/girodias.html

Martin Gardner to me will always be the brilliant person who gave us The Annotated Alice, on a steady diet of which I grew up as a child, and which is, to this day, a worthy read (I am pleased to report I still possess the original copy that was given to my family in August 1973. I do not recall the occasion. I had just turned seven.).

Here are two amusing letters to the editor published in the same issue of the New York Review of Books in response to a review by Matthew Hodgart of the newly published Ada.

To the Editors:

NYR readers may be amused to know more about why Nabokov, as pointed out in Matthew Hodgart’s excellent review of ADA (May 22), refers to me on p. 542 of his novel as an “invented philosopher.” In my Ambidextrous Universe (Basic Books, 1964), in a section on Kant’s approach to space and time, I quote two lines from Pale Fire. (Nabokov’s page citation is to the British Penguin Press edition; he will find his lines rendered in Russian on p. 159 of a Russian paperback translation.) I did not mention Nabokov but credited the poem instead to his invented poet, John Shade. Nabokov returns the joke by calling me “invented,” since my book appeared on Terra, a perhaps imaginary earth, whereas the action of ADA occurs on Anti-Terra, an earth of antimatter. (Nabokov’s novel exploits the familiar science-fiction concept of “parallel worlds” first used so entertainingly by H. G. Wells in his greatest Utopia novel, Men Like Gods.)

Unfortunately, some astonishing recent experiments on time reversal were made too late for me to discuss them in my book or for Nabokov to refer to them in the remarkable essay on time that is Part 4 of ADA. It now appears that if there is an Anti-Terra in the cosmos it is not only mirror-reflected and charge-reversed, but possibly also changing in a time direction opposite to our own. A New American Library paperback edition of The Ambidextrous Universe will appear this summer with a last chapter much lengthened to explain these fantastic new developments. The new section was written, alas, too soon for me to quote from Nabokov’s imaginary antinovel with its palindromic (reversible) title.

Martin Gardner

Hastings-on-Hudson

New York

Montreux-Palace Hotel

Montreux, Switzerland

Matthew Hodgart, Esq.

Cornell University

Department of English

Sir,

I do not really mind your introducing ridiculous errors (such as “at graze” instead of “at gaze” or the reference to Gardner—look up that passage in his book and index) all through your review of ADA, but I do object violently to your seeing in reunited Van and Ada (both rather horrible creatures) a picture of my married life. What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life? I expect a prompt apology from you.

Vladimir Nabokov

from an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk [1971-72]:

Personal Past

“Pure  Time,  Perceptual  Time, Tangible Time, Time free of
content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time  described
by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
     The  Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present,
but it looks somewhat out of focus.  The  Past  is  a  constant
accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for
constant  retrospection  and  the best we can do is to pick out
and try to retain  those  patches  of  rainbow  light  flitting
through  memory.  The  act  of  retention  is  the  act of art,
artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic  re-combination
of  actual  events.  The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and
the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken  by
a   stranger  to  console  sentimental  bereavement.  The  good
memoirist, on the other hand, does his best  to  preserve  the
utmost  truth  of  the  detail. One of the ways he achieves his
intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing  the
right patch of remembered color.”

The fragments of Nabokov’s last unfinished novel are due to be published on November 17, 2009 (or November 3, depending on which press release you read) by Random House (Penguin in the UK). Included with the 10,000 word manuscript are removeable facsimiles of the 138 index cards on which the book was composed, which is of interest to me, since they may offer considerable insight into Nabokov’s thinking and writing process. It’s worth noting that The New Yorker declined to publish an excerpt of the novel, and so Playboy, incidentally the first serial-rights publisher of Ada, will be publishing a 5000 word excerpt (half the book!) in their December issue (on newsstands November 10).

Alvin Toffler conducted an erudite and intense interview with Nabokov for Playboy in January 1964. The link is below.

But first, an excerpt:

PLAYBOY: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
NABOKOV: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/vladimir-nabokov-playboy-interview/index.html

This eminenly readable book, published in 2007, is an insightful and satisfying glance into the world of Nabokov’s writings (in large part devoted to Lolita, but  nicely addressing the complexity present in pretty much everything Nabokov committed to paper). With chapters dealing with morality, art, deceit, lexicomania, it’s a wonderful introduction to the chess playing lepidopterist. There are some surprises here, from Adolf Eichmann being given Lolita to read while awaiting trial in Jerusalem, to a possible real life proto-Humbert, nympholept Harry Lanz, Nabokov’s colleague and chess partner at Stanford University (interestingly the Stanford Alumni magazine has published an article about Lanz in which it does not shirk from revealing his extracurricular interests. See link below).

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/lolita.html