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in which Humbert dwells. His particular Lecherville has, as far as I
know, no well-known clinically respectable name of long standing (Old
Can't-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard Krafft-Ebing has to resort to
"violation of persons under the age of fourteen" for his map). This
is important, I feel. Humbert himself tells us: "I am not concerned with
so-called 'sex' at all. Anyone can imagine these elements of animality.
A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once and for all the perilous
magic of nymphets." Indeed, the "sex" in this book is all subject to
tender exegesis (after one rare moment of melodramatic tenderness
from Lolita:
"It
may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that
I have the ability-a most singular case, I presume-of shedding tor–
rents of tears throughout the other tempest"). The not-quite-teen-age
girl herself, of course, providing her learned lover with duties involving
the procurement of sundaes and movie magazines, is the only plausible
modern
femme fatale.
She is elusive, perverse, and, above all,
transient
(each nymphet has but a few years of affinitive power). Indeed, there
is
a term for the moral condition that is the subject of this book, but
it comes from the lexicon of purely literary pathology. "Nympholepsy,"
the frenzy of attachment to an unattainable object, was a common word
for a commonly cultivated romantic state. I rather think that Mr.
Nabokov's strategy was to literalize the word's metaphor, and to write
of a class of real nymphets who could produce in their palely loitering
admirers the rhetorical action whose fruit is romantic writing. Swinburne
and Poe provide the names for the two lost loves, and the lost child and
the Lady of Pain unite, for Mr. Nabokov himself, in one "fair, nasty
nymph."
Lolita,
if it is anything
"really,"
is the record of Mr. Nabokov's
love affair with the romantic novel, a today-unattainable literary object
as short-lived of beauty as it is long of memory.
It
is also, not to
change the subject for a minute, just about the funniest book I
remember having read.
Coming Exhibitions:
Kenzo Okada
Ad Reinhardt
W illiam Congdon
Betty Parsons Gallery
15 East 57 Street, N. Y.
John Hollander
TIBOR DE NAGY
GALLERY
2.4 E. 67 STREET
corner of Madison Avenue
