The Nabokov Problem

 

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)

If you were to ask me which of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels is his best, the likelihood is that I would begin by providing myself a bit of a buffer, prefacing my remarks by saying that Ada, or Ardor is the most accomplished from the standpoint of literary prosecraft as well as being the most moving and most personal to this great and super unusual Russian aristocrat author in exile. Dig? I think you can see where this is going. The intractable problem here is that Nabokov’s actual greatest novel is indisputably Lolita. For ever and ever, Lolita has predictably arrived in paperback form with a blurb on the back or front surreptitiously attributed to Vanity Fair: “the only convincing love story of our century.” Since the century in question is the one that brought us the Holocaust and television, we might be prepared to take that dubious line with a grain of salt. As Vanity Fair has no mouth with which to speak or hands with which to write/type, the onus is on us to dig a little deeper and reveal the true author of the blurb, who turns out to be the usually very fine writer Gregor von Rezzori, among the most distinguished offspring of the dead-and-gone Austro-Hungarian Empire (he could probably relate more than a little to Nabokov on a personal level). Alas, unfortunately for all of us, von Rezzori had a little more to say: “a deeply touching story of unfulfillable longing, of suffering through love, love of such ardor that though it concentrated on its subject monomaniacally, it actually aimed beyond it, until it flowed back into the great Eros that had called it into being.” I actually have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. The only thing this novel flows back into is the bubble of blood in the mouth of a dying fiend. Nabokov himself said that the novel was about the “cheerful barbarism” of America and for me as a reader it is very obviously his only unambiguous crime novel. I mean, Jim Thompson must have been hella jealous. If it is no longer fresh in your mind, let me rehash the story for you: a criminal European pervert with a dodgy superiority complex inveigles himself into the life of a dowdy adult American woman and develops a fixation on her daughter, twelve years of age when introduced, who the European characterizes as a “nymphette” but who is also the most vulgar and ill-mannered character in the whole novel, then he kidnaps her and takes her on the road where before too terribly long another malign pervert takes a shine to her; even though the European man has grown to despise Lolita—who isn’t getting any younger or more cultured—the last thing he is about to do is let some other interloper abscond with her like he weren’t standing right there glaring his most astringent glare. The only character in this captivating and hideous story who I’m able to identify with at all is the dowdy American woman, Charlotte Haze, who makes the fateful mistake of renting the European man a room, thereby unthinkingly introducing him to her lewd little daughter. We are all Charlotte Haze, are we not, when disreputable shit is going on around us and those involved are going to great lengths not to tell us anything? I think some people just call that “family life.” In Stanley Kubrick’s uneven and uncharacteristically slack film version of Lolita (1962), Shelley Winters gives the standout performance of the whole picture, imbuing Charlotte with more pathos and with more ironic humour than she has in the novel. This is a variation on the job Shelley Winters was basically always given. She was widely-reputed to be the smartest woman in Hollywood—somebody once told me she knew at least as much as the C.I.A.—but anybody can see that she isn’t anybody’s idea of a classic screen beauty. (You put her next to Elizabeth Taylor and she doesn’t have to act embarrassed.) In great and immortal films like He Ran All the Way and A Place in the Sun, both from 1951, Shelley Winter is treated with cruelty and unnecessary meanness by men like John Garfield and Montgomery Clift until she girds her loins and finally prepares herself to have them treat her with love…and they treat her even worse.