BOO KS
559
"Homburg," etc.) and indeed, with everything else. "Guilty of killing
Quilty," he mutters toward the beginning of the narrative, "Oh my
Lolita, I have only words to play with." Usually the games are even
more Joycean, especially in a long section in which are described the
recondite
noms de guerre
with which his pursuing rival, the more to
pique him, fills out motel registers. One thinks of Thurber's mad fixation
on the linguistic games with which he avoids social confrontations. But
in
Lolita,
the word-play leads back to the love-play always; it is a little
like an extended trope on the pathetic fallacy, in which verbal hocus–
pocus makes the obsessive object light up, in intellectual neon, every–
where.
The problem of what to make of
Lolita
has led certain of the book's
admirers to beg off its sexual and literary outlandishness by remarking
that the whole thing is
really
Mr. Nabokov's love affair with America.
Certainly Dolores herself, with her outrageous jargon and tastes, is
part of what Auden has called the "heterogeneous dreck" of the Ameri–
can landscape through which she and her doting lover move. But there
is something more here, surely, some better way for the reader to escape
(if
he must) the too-serious acceptance of the suburb of heterosexuality
Coming November 15th
VENICE
OBSERVED
A literary as well as visual delight–
Mary McCarthy's celebrated portrait of
Venetian civilization in 60,000 words,
embellished with
64
pages in full color
and 200 in black and white.
Size 9%" by 12%", $15.00
Cecil
Beaton
by
MARY MuCARTHY
REYNAL
&
co.
221 East 49th St., New York 17, N.
Y.
