Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me

Rereading “Lolita” and reflecting on crossing paths with two heroes on Route 66.

By Ian Frazier The New Yorker

 

I first read “Lolita” fifty years ago, as a teen-ager. When I praised it to my mother—she taught high-school English and was a reader—she said that she hadn’t liked it, that it was a horrible, sad story. I disregarded her opinion, as I did with a lot of what my parents told me. I kept rereading the book, and eventually moved on to all of Nabokov’s other works in English that I could find. Nabokov mentioned landmarks of importance to him in his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” and I sometimes went to visit them. Travelling in Russia, I looked up the town house where his family had lived in St. Petersburg. It’s now a museum, and I’ve been to it three or four times.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90.”

Childhood is a darkened, fantasy-filled theatre in which, after a long or short while, the houselights are turned on, and the brightness makes you blink, and then you see the candy wrappers under the seats and the lines for the bathrooms. That moment can happen at any time. For me the lights in the Nabokov theatre—a glorious, twinkling venue—got turned fully on when I was in my thirties, during what was for me the waning end of our modern long version of childhood. Afterward I understood better what my mother had meant about “Lolita.”

We lived in Ohio, the centrifugal state, where it seemed that if you let go of the front-door knob for just a second the next thing you knew you’d be flung a thousand miles down the highway. Our house, in a rural development in the town of Hudson, had a gravel drive, which led to a gravel street, to a barely paved road, to Interstate Highway 80, and to New York in one direction and San Francisco in the other. Or to Florida or Arizona or Canada or Alaska or anywhere else—the full three hundred and sixty degrees.

Across the street, past the Gellatlys’ house, and past their back yard, was the house of my friend Don. He and I read “Lolita” at about the same time. Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “winged gentlemen of the jury,” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School. These girls were like Lolita, with their field-hockey sticks, and book bags, and scuffed knees on the school bus. Lolita starred in a famous, best-selling book by a high-class foreign author. Therefore, the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them, or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn’t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls, and to be us, in love with them. The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl, Lolita, who looked and talked and acted like girls we got to be next to, and hopelessly far from, every day.

As if there weren’t enough roads waiting to take us away, more kept being built, making obsolete certain previous roads, which then had “old” added to their names. Thus there soon were Route 8 and Old Route 8, Route 14 and Old Route 14. Businesses on the old roads languished, but on Old Route 14, which was near where we lived, a place called the Hilltop Motel hung on for a long while. We knew the family that ran it, whom I’ll call the Carluccis. Tony, their son, was in my grade in school. I liked him and, when I was younger, I sometimes went to his house to play. The family lived in rooms on the second floor of a building whose first floor was the motel’s restaurant, where Tony and I sat on shiny red stools at the counter and ordered hamburgers. Then we went upstairs and played with his electric-football set while adults at a table in the next room drank and talked. Once, Tony pointed out a man in the group and told me that he had just got out of prison. The Hilltop’s accommodations were small cabins, which my parents took an ironical view of, for reasons I did not at first understand.

Tony had a younger sister, Rosa, who was as rosaceous as all girls and women of that name deserve to be. She had long, dark hair and dark eyes, and at an early age she grew into the kind of plum-tinted look so admired by the old-time painters of her ancestresses. Once, I was riding my bike and I saw her and her friend Barb leaning on the railing of a bridge over Interstate 80, known to us as the Ohio Turnpike, and watching the traffic. That such beauty could be found on a tarry two-lane road among farm fields in Ohio proved that God was everywhere. Or—maybe better—that art could be anywhere, even in our unartistic (as compared with Europe) U.S.A. Oh, winged gentlemen, and my mom, of the jury! Mr. Nabokov, the defendant, gave that gift to us Americans, to me.

I was too shy to say anything to these visions, Rosa and Barb. Did they give me a mocking look as I pedalled by? If they were challenging me to step into Ohio’s centrifugal jet stream, jump the wire fence, stand on the turnpike’s apron, stick out my thumb, and disappear down the highway like the light diminishing to a dot in the middle of a nineteen-sixties TV screen—well, I did do that, not very many years afterward. But even when I was in my early teens, and weak with love for Rosa (and Barb), I had already been all over western North America as a passenger in the family station wagon, along with my mom and two brothers and two sisters, driven by my Ohio-flung dad.

Like most places, Ohio used to have worse winters than it does now. My mother’s mother suffered from lung trouble, and, when my grandfather retired after forty-two years of teaching in the Cleveland public schools, the doctors recommended that he remove his wife from Ohio’s winters to a warmer and drier climate. He chose Tucson, Arizona. This decision was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was three years old when my grandparents bought a house in a development recently laid out among the cacti of the Sonoran Desert, a short drive from Tucson’s main drag. Give my dad a target such as the one presented by my grandparents’ four-bedroom ranch-style home and he could not be stopped. He let Ohio fling him at it like a dart, trailing all of us behind. We drove to Arizona to visit my grandparents every year, sometimes twice a year, throughout the nineteen-fifties and into the sixties, until they died. After that, we kept making long western journeys—to Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Yukon Territory, or Tok Junction, Alaska, and beyond—almost like annual migrations.

Nabokov worked on “Lolita” in the early fifties, during summers off from teaching at Cornell, while he and his wife, Véra, were driving around the country hunting butterflies. In an afterword to a later edition of the book, he said that one of the towns where he wrote it was Portal, Arizona. To get to that place from Ithaca, New York, he very likely would have driven part of the way on the all-time-greatest American touring road, Route 66. If you were going from the Northeast to the Southwest, you probably took Route 66. The pleasures of this road were so many that books, entire careers, have been devoted to remembering and recording them, now that 66 has itself become an “old” road, superseded by Interstate 44, a characterless four-lane.

 

In my work as a freelance writer pursuing one story or another around the West, I sometimes come upon an unchanged stretch of “old” 66, and I’ll see something I remember from my childhood, and the tiny neural address that held the memory of the place in my brain will still be there, in good condition, though unvisited for sixty years. Outside Flagstaff, or maybe closer to Winslow, Arizona, while I was doing research for a piece about meteorites, I meandered off the four-lane onto an undisturbed span of old Route 66, and there was the giant concrete tepee at the gas station where we must have stopped dozens of times. As a kid, I loved that tepee, with its smooth, cool concrete floor and its racks of postcards. Another time, not long ago in Oklahoma, out of the corner of my eye I saw the motel with the Western theme—wagon wheels, oxen yokes, branding irons—where my family had stayed years before. My dad liked to drive straight through, night and day, but two thousand miles from Hudson to Tucson in one go was a haul even for him. The motels where we stopped offered sweet oases of pressed sheets and varnished knotty-pine walls and cigarette-smoke-scented furnishings, an interesting change from sleeping on a mattress on the station wagon’s folded-down back seats, all five of us siblings jumbled together. The cigarette smell also signified not-home—neither of my parents smoked—and recalled the Hilltop Motel’s nostalgic, heady hints of sin.

We didn’t know, nor did Nabokov, that we happened to be living in the golden age of motels. By the time I was out and driving on my own, most of the old motels had disappeared, replaced by the now familiar chains that try to be identical everywhere. In no work of literature are the wonders of the vanished Motel Age preserved and celebrated better than in “Lolita.” Motels and hotels and lodges dance by like a colorful all-American chorus line in the novel, while recurring road trips move the plot. After Lolita’s mother, whom Humbert has married to get to the daughter, is run over by a car and killed, he takes the girl on a long cross-country ramble, from one motel to the next:

We came to know—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its golden-brown glaze, of fried-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain whitewashed Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell.

Ventriloquizing Humbert, the author goes on to list the places they stayed, and their attractions and proprietors and clienteles, for two more pages. The only other person to chronicle the Motel Age so well was the artist Saul Steinberg, whom I was lucky enough to know for twenty-odd years before his death, in 1999, and who gave me a drawing, “Paradise Cabins” [see illustration], which closely resembles the Hilltop Motel, home of the nacreous Rosa.

“Home of the nacreous Rosa” is not something I would normally write, but when the subject is Nabokov I take on a voice I think of as his, although of course it’s not, nor is it mine, but a nowhere hybrid voice, like a clumsy Russian hacking of an American Web site. Nabokov and Steinberg were friends, and Saul once told me that he gave up smoking while visiting the Nabokovs in Montreux. He just quit, with no program or nicotine chewing gum or anything, and never touched a cigarette again. He was a decisive guy.

Hearing Saul talk about his road trips all over America, such as the one in which he and his wife, the artist Hedda Sterne, drove a Cadillac they had bought from Igor Stravinsky from New York to Los Angeles, I understood that they and my family could well have crossed paths. The same is true of us and the Nabokovs. Vladimir and Véra sometimes went West as soon as classes at Cornell ended for the summer. Our family often headed for Tucson when I got out of school in June. The Nabokovs would have been unable to avoid Route 66, and my family always took it, regarding it as our grandparents’ very long driveway. In theory, we and the Nabokovs could have been on that road simultaneously. So it’s not impossible, either, that when we stopped at the Wagon Wheel Motel (or wherever) on 66 the foreign-looking professor and his elegant wife were in a room nearby. If they saw my dad and mom and their five baby-boomer offspring piling out of our blue Ford station wagon and boisterously occupying the adjoining room, did they admire us blond, frowsy-headed children, as my parents thought everybody did? Or not?

In an afterword to a 1970 edition of “Lolita,” Nabokov referred to a place called Gray Star as “the capital town of the book.” After Humbert is out of her life, Lolita, by then married and pregnant but still in her teens, moves to Gray Star with her husband, Dick Schiller. Gray Star is in Alaska, as the larger context makes clear. “Lolita” purports to be a manuscript written in prison by an accused criminal, Humbert Humbert, who is using this made-up name instead of his real one so as not to bring disgrace on anybody with a connection to the story, especially his beloved Lolita. Through his lawyer, the manuscript has come into the possession of an editor and psychologist, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. The book’s subtitle, “The Confessions of a White Widowed Male,” supplied by Humbert, makes it sound like a case study, perfect for Dr. Ray, who writes a brief foreword explaining the provenance. Ray tells us of Humbert’s and Lolita’s ends. Humbert had expected to die soon, and his wish was that the book not be published until Lolita was also dead. He had hoped that she would outlive him by many years. Dr. Ray informs us that Humbert died of coronary thrombosis in prison in mid-November of 1952, shortly after finishing his manuscript, and that Mrs. Richard Schiller died in childbirth in Gray Star on Christmas Day of the same year. Per Humbert’s wishes as conveyed to his lawyer, Dr. Ray is therefore publishing the manuscript.

Is Gray Star the book’s “capital town” because Lolita—along with her baby, a stillborn girl—died there? Had Lolita lived a normal span of years, the book would not have come out, following its own logic, until our present century, and maybe would not exist even today; Lolita, born in 1935, would have been eighty-five in 2020. But I don’t think that’s the real reason that Nabokov made such a significant-sounding statement about Gray Star.

The first real-life piece of Russia that I ever saw was Sputnik, crossing the sky over Ohio one night in 1957. The second was when I went on a cruise to the Canary Islands with my family in 1973. The trip came about because one of us siblings had died. My brother Fritz, six years younger than me, died of leukemia when he was a sophomore in high school. The next year, at Christmastime, the spacious country we used to ramble was too small to hold my bereft dad and his sad family, so he took us all on a package cruise. We drove to J.F.K. airport, left the car, flew to Spain, got on a ship, and docked one night on Tenerife, in the Canaries. I came on deck and saw, anchored nearby, a huge, dark ship with a name in Cyrillic letters on its prow. I asked my dad what they said, and from his tour-book familiarity with the alphabet he sounded out “Mikhail Lermontov”; below the name was the hammer and sickle. The Lermontov projected the aura of a death star combined with a ghost ship, looming above and aloof from the other ships in the harbor. When we got home, I bought a paperback translation of Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” and read it. I admired how cool, dashing, and romantic Lermontov was.

The name Gray Star and the memory of that ship are somehow near to each other in my mind. To me the name reads as Soviet, like the big gray letters, the brutalistic “L” resembling an “A” without a crossbar, on the Lermontov’s towering black bow. Gray Star could be the red star of the U.S.S.R. drained to grayness by the cold of the north. The name speaks of almost unreachable remoteness, and of Polaris, visible to both the Russians and to us, and of gray, beeping Sputnik going by. The novel’s “capital town” is situated in our only state that shares a border with Russia. And, as recently as Nabokov’s grandparents’ lifetimes, Alyaska was a koloniya—a colony—of Russia. The place where Lolita dies is almost in Russia, and almost not in America.

The site of Lolita’s mournful exit points toward Russia without mentioning it. On the surface, Nabokov does not come off as a Russian writer in the book. The text does not refer to many works of Russian literature, and he told an interviewer that he intentionally kept all touches of Russianness out of the portrait of Humbert, whose background he made Swiss, Austrian, French, and English, “with a dash of the Danube.” Maybe something in Nabokov drew his thoughts Russia-ward despite himself as he devised Lolita’s fate. I don’t know if he ever went to Alaska, but he can’t have been thinking of (for example) the town of Nome as a model for Gray Star. I stopped in Nome a number of times in my midlife project of going to Siberia by travelling west, continuing my own extension of my family’s chronic westering. From Nome I flew to such Russian destinations as Chukotka, across the Bering Strait, and because I generally had to wait for tolerable flying weather I spent a lot of time in Nome. The town consists mostly of frozen mud, quonset huts, and heaps of rusted, twisted metal. Other Alaskan towns I’ve seen look basically the same. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the feistiness of these towns. But for Lolita to wind up in such a place when she was seventeen years old and pregnant, and then for her to die in childbirth—what kind of medical facilities would they have had in any Gray Star in 1952?—made for a tough finish to an already ruined life. I do not believe that any real place could have been the inspiration for Nabokov’s Gray Star. We have to imagine the town as more of an abstract notion.

The last time Humbert sees Lolita, she is still in the Lower Forty-eight, living in an unspecified non-coastal state that, judging by the amount of time it takes for him to drive to it from the New York area, could be Ohio. He is in pursuit of the even bigger pervert than himself who stole Lolita from him, and he finds his beloved in shabby surroundings. When he arrives, Dick, the husband, who’s partly deaf because of a war injury, is working on some repair project out in back of their house with a friend, another vet, who has only one arm. The friend injures his hand, they come inside, and Lolita bandages the cut. Humbert observes, “Her ambiguous, brown and pale beauty excited the cripple.

On a rereading of the book during the early part of my chronological (but not actual) adulthood, I recall stumbling over that “cripple” for the first time. I wondered about Nabokov/Humbert’s use of the term to refer to someone who lost an arm in the war. The dimmer switch in the Nabokov theatre was turning to bright. And why did Dick, the poor schmo of a husband, have to be hard of hearing? His disability contributes little to the story, except to provide the image of Lolita shouting at him in order to be heard, as if he were the geezer and not Humbert. Somewhere I read a review that took Nabokov to task for picking on people with disabilities in his books. I had not previously noticed how often he does that. The entire plot of “Laughter in the Dark,” for example, revolves around the cuckolding of a blind man. The houselights in the theatre grew even brighter. Nabokov started to seem less like a lovable, bumbling Professor Pnin and more like a pitiless White Russian with a monocle and an ebony cigarette holder. 

I then looked at Lolita, the character, with the same literal-mindedness I applied to Gray Star. After Humbert has drugged her and attempted to rape her during their first night alone together, she wakes up, happy and frisky, and Humbert says to the reader, “I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.” Lolita is twelve years old when this happens. Humbert informs us that she knows what she is doing because she had a lot of sex with a boy at the summer camp she has attended since she was eleven. Lolita is a “nymphet,” as we’re told again and again. That must be the explanation—a nymphet is someone who starts having intercourse on her own initiative when she is in the seventh grade.

Humbert’s claim, “It was she who seduced me,” attempts to excuse him from quite as much guilt as he deserves for raping a child. And she does know she has been raped—she says as much in a scene of distress and near-hysteria that follows soon after.

“It was she who seduced me” gives the reader a potential too-easy out as well, along the lines of the familiar “She was asking for it.” I guess it’s not impossible that nymphets exist, but I never knew or heard of one. Kids that age might fool around with each other, but they don’t go immediately to fucking. They’re not even sure how it works. For the author to portray Lolita as an experienced twelve-year-old who proposes grownup sex to her stepfather and then expertly and matter-of-factly begins it is implausible at best, and at worst extremely low and cheesy. Some reviewers of the book in the fifties thought it much worse than that, calling it filth, etc. The part where Humbert fantasizes about having a daughter with Lolita, a “Lolita the Second,” whom he would also molest in due course, producing a “Lolita the Third,” whom ditto, takes us to a whole new level of insane creepiness. That Lolita’s baby daughter is stillborn removes the possibility of another nymphet entering the world and running afoul of a future Humbert or similar fiend—a minor mercy granted by the author to his hard-luck characters.

At their last meeting, Lolita tells Humbert the name of her abductor, Clare Quilty. (Of course, Humbert says that the nymphet had conspired in her own abduction.) Teary and more in love with her than ever, he asks her to leave that very minute and come away with him. She declines. He then drives back east, finds the disgusting Quilty, whose own history of degrading children conveniently makes Humbert look less bad, and confronts him in his Playboy-style mansion. He forces the criminal to read a self-indictment in verse that Humbert has written and then shoots him repeatedly with Chum, his nickname for the pistol he has brought along. Checking to see if Quilty is dead, Humbert notices two flies landing on the fresh corpse “with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck.” Humbert’s only friend—his gun—and the two lucky flies at the beginning of their own insectoid buddy movie round out this cautionary love story.

In a review in The New Yorker in 1958, the critic Donald Malcolm noted that comedy and horror are often combined. He placed Nabokov among those satirical writers who go back and forth between the two, citing Gogol and Twain. Russian humor-writing in general is horrifying, from the nightmare unrealities in Gogol’s “The Nose” and “The Overcoat,” through the Bolshevik-era mad laughter in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and “Heart of a Dog,” to the absurdism of Daniil Kharms, who starved to death in one of Stalin’s prisons, and whose actual fate makes his stories seem almost gallant in their carelessness about logic and mercy toward the reader. Malcolm’s mention of Twain may seem surprising, because we are less likely to think of him as a writer of horror tales, but he told ghost stories (“The Golden Arm”) as part of his lecture performances. Moments of high-gothic horror occur in “Tom Sawyer,” as when Tom and Huck are watching the grave robbers dig up a corpse at midnight, and in “Huckleberry Finn,” when Huck gets chased around a cabin by Pap, his drunk and delusional white-trash dad.

In this light, “Lolita” ’s subtitle, “The Confessions of a White Widowed Male,” stands out as a joke on the well-intentioned psychologizing editor, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. For Humbert to have given his manuscript such a subtitle was a comic understatement of major proportions. Humbert is not so much a “white widowed male” as he is a maniac who should have been locked up, and the key thrown away, on page 42. Nothing is as funny as a criminal when he is carefully describing the (to him) self-evident and exonerating reasons for his crime. That kind of monologue will be funny almost from the first syllable and get only funnier as it goes on, even as your horror rises. “Lolita” is written in a monster’s voice, and the comedy and horror come from our awareness that the narrator is a ten-times-bigger monster than he knows.

My mother died thirty-two years ago, and as I reread the book recently for the _n_th time I used her eyes and winced and recoiled the way I imagine she did. (It really is a wince-inducing book, and far more so today.) I go back to the scene in “Huckleberry Finn” where Pap Finn is getting drunk before he starts chasing Huck around and calling him the angel of death and trying to kill him. As the liquor takes hold, Pap begins a lowlife soliloquy about the “gov’ment,” and about a white-shirted [N-word] who wouldn’t have given Pap the right of way if Pap hadn’t shoved the [N-word] off the sidewalk; and, while Pap is ripping and tearing around, he stumbles over a tub on the floor and then kicks it for revenge. “But it warn’t good judgement,” Huck says, “because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leakin’ out the front.” Pap lets out a scream “that fairly made a body’s hair raise,” and then hops around cursing the gov’ment, and the [N-word], and the tub, with unprintable curses “hove” at all of them.

The scene is one of the wildest and funniest in American literature. Humbert’s tale—his long and morally clueless address to the winged gentlemen and -women of the jury—belongs in the same atrocious-hilarious genre. “Lolita” continues to challenge the equanimity of sane and decent readers, just as it has become difficult or impossible, for all practical purposes, to read Pap’s soliloquy out loud in respectable circles today. (That may have always been the case, but for changing reasons.) Horror and comedy entangle themselves with each other in these great American works of satire until our laughter and our recoiling become almost the same.

America construes itself as a game that anybody can play, and Russians know how to play it well, as we learn and relearn. In “Lolita,” Nabokov gave us a copy of ourselves we couldn’t tell from the original. No American writer has done the reverse—has written a novel about Russia that understood the country so profoundly, and that Russians themselves read widely and loved. “Lolita” is an American book in a way that no novel by a native-born American is a Russian book. It’s an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious, like “Huckleberry Finn.” We encounter these works as best we can, and fail to civilize them, and pass by in our generations, and they remain. ♦

This piece is drawn from “Lolita in the Afterlife,” a collection of essays edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, which will be published by Penguin Random House in March.

Published in the print edition of the December 14, 2020, issue, with the headline “Rereading “Lolita”.”