It’s 70 years since the original publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita - older than many of the men caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, some of whom, as emails reveal, flew to Epstein’s private island on what was referred to as “The Lolita Express.”
It’s also been said that Epstein kept a first edition of the novel at his bedside. Surprising, because it’s not likely he would easily follow its elegant, erudite style, full of arcane words in English and numerous phrases in French. Nabokov‘s sardonic, cynical, professorial protagonist Humbert Humbert admits he has a soft spot for Continental clichés. And for humor and irony. And, of course, for “nymphets,” a word Nabokov invented.
Humbert is surprised, in fact, to discover that he was not the first to deflower smart-mouth tomboy Dolores –Lolita -Hayes, who winds up making the first overt move for consummation. Were Epstein looking for hot passages of older men on the make with young girls, he would surely have been impatient with Humbert’s often hilarious “confession” that constitutes the book’s narrative.
Not one scene is pornographic – or even erotic. As a recent article in The Atlantic by Yale author Graeme Wood put it –“What Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Understand about Lolita” was . . . “everything.”
Lolita is not a prurient tale of pederasty but a clever and moving faux-memoir written by Humbert in prison. It’s also a satirical picaresque about manners and mores in mid-20th century America, and – at the end-- a painful love story, pitiful, ambivalent, sad. It may be one of those books people think they’ve read or leafed through, but if so, obviously not did appreciate Nabokov’s stylistic achievement in this, which he said was his favorite, most challenging work. And, as it turns out, still his most controversial.
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer’s writer and a caustic cultural critic, especially of literary trends then, such as psychiatry and T.S. Eliot-type modernist poetry. He admired especially Joyce, Proust, Melville, Kafka, Poe, and Flaubert. He also liked to play with references and allusions, or let Humbert play. And do they show!
Most people seem to know the general story, if not from the book, then more likely from the movies made from it – Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version starring James Mason and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997 version, with Jeremy Irons. Young Humbert – not his real name - has a traumatic friendship abroad with a girl his age, which ends tragically. He comes to America, still in thrall to his sensual memories, and takes a room with the widow Haze because he’s attracted to her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores. The widow dies in an accident, and Humbert inherits his nubile charge and takes her on a cross-country motel romp. Then they drive back to the Northeast and “Dad” enrolls her in a private girls’ school, where she falls under the spell of a well-known playwright, Clare Quilty, a more negatively charged predator, and escapes Humbert’s obsessive watch. Humbert is bent on revenge. And exacts it. His “confession,” written in prison, is addressed to a prospective jury, but he dies of coronary thrombosis before he’s brought to trial. The last and first words of his manuscript and the novel are “Lolita.”
Nabokov’s literary games begin with a foreword by a fictional editor, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. in August 1955 who writes that he received “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male” from Humbert’s lawyer. Ray’s convinced that the manuscript will become a “classic in psychiatric circles.” Eye roll, please.
The foreword, of course, is just the beginning of Nabokov’s dazzling multi-layered exploration of the complexity of human desire, obsession, and retribution. To trade Nabokov’s verbal brilliance for any cinematic interpretation seems impoverishing. To allow his legacy to be linked to a contemporary sleaze like Epstein is downright dishonorable.
