558
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Lolita" is an American nymphet, one Dolores Haze, whose affair with
Humbert occupies the bulk of the book. After some rather telescoped
description of a scholarly career, Humbert tells of his unfortunate early
marriage with the chronologically mature but otherwise infantile Valeria.
She resolves his misery by running off with a Tsarist taxi-driver
in
Paris, ending up, before her death, in typically Nabokovian fashion
("the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used
there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by
a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human
and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position
on all fours"). Finally landing him in America, chance leads Humbert
to a small New England town and the role of roomer in the house of
the widowed Charlotte Haze, whose bobby-sox daughter, Lolita, strikes
up in him irresistible reverberations of the lost Annabel. Humbert mar–
ries Mrs. Haze solely in order to murder her and gain legal guardianship
of the child. It is through no action of his own that he finds himself
a widower again, driving to Lolita's summer camp to remove his
daughter, take her home, and possess her.
On their first night together, Lolita turns out to be completely
corrupt. From then on, their affair consists of a frenzied car-and-motel
tour of the whole country, finally culminating in the loss of Lolita to
Clare Quilty, a playwright, and the murder of that hated rival in one
of the funniest and most grotesque scenes in the book.
Throughout all this, Mr. Nabokov's attention is fixed on the sen–
timental treatment of the love affair itself, and the satiric portrayal
of the American
kitsch
through
whi~h
the lovers peregrinate. It is Hum–
bert's own amazingly flexible rhetoric, primarily, which permits of rapid
switches back and forth from: "and feeling as I did her warm weight
on my lap (so that, in a sense, I was always with Lolita as a mother is
with child)" to: "We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop.
1001." Much of the book's comic genius lies in the style, which alternates
elements of Turgenev and mock Proust, rigorous Constant-like
analyse
de l'amour
and parody and pastiche. There are moments of surrealoid
super-clarity, but unlike true surrealism, these glimpses never stake all
on the effect of the moment, abandoning any further dramatic utility.
They seem to spring from the kind of Dickensian eye which lets Esther
Summerson
in
Bleak House
notice, before any more concrete signs of
familial disorder, the fact that one of Mrs. J ellyby's curtains is secured
with a fork. But the most pervasive single device of style is the verbal
diddle. Humbert fiddles with his own name ("Hamburg," "Humbug,"
