BOO KS
557
THE PERILOUS MAGIC OF NYMPHETS
LOLITA. By Vladimir Nobokov. The Olympio Press, Poris. fro 1800 ($5.00).
In the bizarre mixture of vintage 1830 sham editorial note
and parody
Saturday Review
piece that serves as an introduction to this
remarkable book, we are earnestly informed that "As a case history,
'Lolita' will become no doubt a classic in psychiatric circles." There
is no doubt that it will not. The shades of Stavrogin, Lewis Carroll,
Tiberius, Popeye, or worse hinted at in the foreword, the pornographic
promises implicit in its publication by a Parisian erotica house, seem
only ghosts to be dispelled almost in the very first chapter. Even to
state that the book is
about
a cultivated European emigre in love with
a twelve-year-old girl is misleading: modern readers cannot help but
refer such a theme to the wrong novelistic conventions. There is no
clinical, sociological, or mythic seriousness about
Lolita,
but it flames
with a tremendous perversity of an unexpected kind. Readers of Mr.
Nabokov's earlier work will be more prepared than most to relate such
a theme to a style weird enough to support it in a new way. They may
understand what it means to say that this book often suggests a terrify–
ingly semi-serious parody of
Manon L escaut
by James Thurber. Nearly
everything a:bout
Lolita
is parodic, save for the primary love story, which
ridicules only itself.
The story is told by one Humbert Humbert, presumably writing
from a psychopathic ward, and, later, from jail. He comes, he informs
us, from a melange of European stock, and was raised on the Riviera,
where his father ran a hotel. There, at the age of twelve, "in a prince–
dom by the sea," he met his first and archetypal love, Annabel Leigh.
Their brief affair having terminated
in
her untimely death, Humbert
crystallizes around her image an ideal type of girl, between the ages
of nine and fourteen, whose sexual power is to forever hold him prisoner.
"Nymphets," he calls such creatures:
Between those age limits are all girl children nymphets? Of course,
not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympho–
lepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion;
and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not
necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the
elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet
from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the
spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island
of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.
