Lolita, in English This Time

There’s not a lot I can say about Lolita that hasn’t already been said. The novel is more than 50 years old now, has been reviewed hundreds of times, and probably discussed thousands of times.

What I wondered was how a novel about a pedophile became not only acceptable to the mainstream public, but considered “classic literature.” 

Even in this modern day, and with my liberal outlook (I don’t believe in censoring what other people want to read), I was a bit shocked by it, so I can imagine how revolting it must have been fifty years ago. And I’m right. The author, Vladimir Nabokov, couldn’t find a publisher for it in the U.S., at first.  My, how publishing has changed! After only four rejections, he began shopping it in France, where it was published in 1955. And right away, it sold 5,000 copies, strictly by word of mouth because no one would review it. What does that say about French society?

Anyway, and finally, Graham Greene, the English author, playwright and literary critic, in an interview, called it

"one of the best novels of the year." 

(Greene became, and remained, quite famous until his death in 1991. He authored one of my favorite novels, The End of the Affair, which was made into a movie starring Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes, for those of you who don’t read.) 

Then the editor of a London newspaper (a tabloid now, but I’m not sure about then) said it was "the filthiest book” he had ever read, and "sheer unrestrained pornography." The British seized all copies of it being shipped into their country, and the French, who had published it in the first place, banned it. In fact, one of the original publishers lost his career over it. How could that result in anything but huge sales?

Leave it to Americans. G. P. Putnam had the foresight to publish it in 1958, and it was the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks.  And that’s how Lolita became both accepted and esteemed as fine literature.

Lolita is not smut. It’s not porn. It is a highly controversial and sensitive subject, but it’s extremely well written, and that’s what separates it from obscenity. It offsets the shock-factor with wry commentary on the American way of life as seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, who is old-world European. Written in first-person, the story is full of puns, anagrams, double entendres, word play, multilingual puns (there are many French phrases, which I did not always look up due to the lack of a French-to-English dictionary at the time and place where I was reading). And, of course, Nabokov coined the word “nymphet.”

I was wrong about Lolita being synonymous with pedophilia. It’s more attuned to sexually precocious girls. Lolita wasn’t all that innocent, in spite of being only twelve when the story began. Sadly, what scandalized us in the 1950’s, is mainstream today. The only difference is that not many twelve-year-olds (at least, not many I know) have affairs with forty-something-year-old men.  Lolita is often described as a love story. I don't know...obsession maybe, but not any kind of love I'd want. In spite of the fact that Humbert Humbert is sexually and violently abusive, there are a couple of moments of selflessness that almost win our sympathy.

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