Click 
A few weeks ago The New Yorker had a story about some books that were on display. These books had been in the personal collection of various famous authors, and all contained interesting marginalia. One was Nabokov’s edition of a collection of New Yorker short stories from the 1950s. In it, he’d assigned each piece a grade, some getting Cs, Bs, As or whatever. He’d only assigned two the high grade of an A+: J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” (discussed here) and his own “Colette,” published July 31, 1948. It turns out that both stories take place during a nice little summer vacation at a resort, though that’s about where the comparisons stop. July is a good time to read either.
Click for a larger image.
This story eventually found its way into Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. I haven’t read that yet. ”Colette” is also sometimes titled “First Love.” It is the memory Nabokov has of a summer trip taken in 1909, when he was 10. The first two pages (of a four page story) take place on the train journey from St. Petersburg to Biarritz in southern France. I kept waiting for Colette to show her face, but she doesn’t. It turns out that is far from a bad thing. In Nabokov’s hands, this train journey memory is magical. For example:
It was marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one’s bed, with part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper berth.
Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench. Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody’s comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord.
There’s such lovely peace there in that night, “somebody’s comfortable cough.” A decade later Nabokov’s life — all of Russia — would be in turmoil, but in 1909 they were still able to travel to France for a two-month vacation. The details feel like memory; the reader feels the nostalgia and the comfort.
Colette, who is nine (and whose real name was Claude Deprès), finally arrives at the narrator’s side: “On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette.” As often happens with young children, they jump right into friendship, having no reason to distrust one another. Our narrator develops an innocent passion for the young girl:
Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, sun-tanned little daughter of a Serbian physician, but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. Colette seemed to me so much stranger than all my other chance playmates at Biarritz! I somehow acquired the feeling that she was less happy than I, less loved.
I like how the love is innocent; it certainly feels true and pure. He loves playing beside her, he worries about her, he empathizes with her. She must trust his love, for one day while looking at a starfish, he kissed him on the cheek:
So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was “You little monkey!”
I kept wondering just what would happen to this young couple. Naturally, this summer fling could not last forever. They were too young to have any power to make it last beyond, yet it does last in Nabokov’s memory:
The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it in, while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows cast on the gravelled path by the interlaced arches of its border.
This is a wonderful short story about an innocent love and its effect through the years. An A+? Well, I think “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” is the better of the two (I like Lolita quite a lot more than Catcher in the Rye, so that is not just a statement in support of the man who inspired this bi-weekly feature and its title), but it was such a pleasant read with some hearty sadness, perfect for a warm summer day when one doesn’t want to contemplate suicide.
This is an interesting project to take on. Many people believe that Lolita is a book somehow sympathetic to pedophiles. Sure, they may say, it probably is written well, but does that excuse the content? Can you get around all the filth just because it is poetic? Doesn’t that, in fact, just make it worse? Well, I’m not necessarily embarassed to read such books, but I was curious about what I would walk away with. Is it famous just because it is scandalous? How does Mr. Nabokov present such a topic?
The first lines are poetic – and disturbing:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps dodwn the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Se was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Several important points of interest are brought to light in these lines. The narrator loves a certain Lolita, a young girl-child. He has done this before. He is a murderer. And a poet. I found it very interesting that Nabakov starts this work in a way remarkably similar to great Romantic poems (some of which probably were written about such sordid love affairs, anyway). Indeed, if Nabokov meant to threaten the reader’s sensibilities (and it seems he did) then he succeeds right out of the gate!
It is understandable why this book gets such a bad rap. Here we have the story of a blissful love affair between a young girl and an older man, a man who goes to disgusting lengths to win her affections. Interestingly, it does read fine on that straightforward level. Lolita practically begs for Humbert Humbert to make love to her. And of course, Humbert Humbert complies. But this is Humbert’s telling – indeed, it is his confession to the police. As far as unreliable narrators go, here’s a great study. Lolita has no way of telling her side of the story. Humbert has monopolized it, and what’s worse, because he is so eloquent, it sounds real. One looks for the layers in his language, not for layers in the story.
I think it’s interesting that on the cover of my edition, Vanity Fair called it “The only convincing love story of our century.” I’d love to read that article to find out it that was said tongue-in-cheek. Whatever the case, pulling that quote certainly leads a browsing book-buyer to assume that this book is in fact a genuine love story. And maybe it is. That’s part of what makes it so interesting.
Enough of that, how was my experience? Excellent. This is a book at once funny and disturbing. Humbert Humbert is an engaging narrator. He begins by explaining his past desires and experiences, and somehow I came to be interested in his humanity despite my disgust at his character. Throughout the story, he engages in layer upon layer of wordplay, some of which, I’m sure, blew right over my head. However, the pieces I caught – like the time when he hides the name of his victim in a french sentence – were fascinatingly well done. It was, I cannot hide, an exhausting read because I was obliged (happily) to read every word carefully. Even in seemingly mundane passages between himself and another mundane character Humbert loads on the dramatic irony. I’m thinking, in particular, of the lengthy passage where Humbert is speaking with headmistress Pratt about Lolita’s
entering an age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, means as much to her as, say, business, business, business connections, business success, mean to your, or much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties.
(Square-dancing!)
The humor is on almost every page, mixed with sadness, darkness, tragedy, and wretchedness. Here is the famous passage from near the beginning of the book:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy has set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at hte bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
But, as I said above, that’s only part of the fun. The deeper aspect, the hidden aspect, is the true character of Dolores Haze. She has witnessed Humbert Humbert’s obsessions and knows what he’s capable of. She’s the title character, and yet she says nothing, even if Humbert Humbert puts words in her mouth. Reading with this in mind hightens the tension between the reader and this confessional manuscript.
Recent Comments