Cruelty, Beauty, and Time:
On Nabokov's Ada and Lolita

 

There are, as I've said, writers who-though they teach us many things about life, writing, and literature, and though we read them with love and ardor-remain in our past. If we return to them in later years, it is not because they still speak to us but out of nostalgia, the pleasure of being taken back to the time when we first read them. Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, and even Faulkner belong to this camp. Today, when I take them up, I do not expect to be overwhelmed with new insights, all I wish is to remember how they once influenced me, how they shaped my soul. They are writers I may from time to time crave, but not writers I still need. 

On the other hand, every time I pick up Proust, it is because I wish to remind myself how boundlessly attentive he is to his heroes' passions. When I read Dostoyevsky, it is because I need to be reminded that, whatever other anxieties and designs he might have, the novelist's main concern is depth. It is almost as if the greatness of such writers stems in part from our profound longing for them. Nabokov is another writer whom I read over and over, and I doubt I will ever be able to give him up.

When I am going on a trip, preparing my suitcase for a summer holiday, or setting off for a hotel to write the last pages of my latest novel, when I pack my dog-eared copies of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory (which in my view shows Nabokov's prose at its finest), why do I feel as if I am packing a box of my medicines?

It is the beauty of Nabokovian prose. But what I call beauty cannot explain this. For lurking beneath the beauty in Nabokov's books there is always something sinister (he used this word in one of his titles), a whiff of tyranny. If the "timelessness" of beauty is an illusion, this is itself a reflection of Nabokov's life and times. So how have I been affected by this beauty, underwritten as it is by a Faustian pact with cruelty and evil?

When we read his famous scenes-Lolita playing tennis; Charlotte's slow descent into Hourglass Lake; Humbert, after he has lost Lolita, standing on the roadside at the top of a little hill, listening to children playing in a small town (a snowless Breughel) and then meeting with someone he loved as a youth in the woods; the afterword for Lolita (which he says took him a month to write, though it is only ten lines); Humbert's visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam; or the crowded family scenes in Ada-my first response is that life is just like this; the writer is telling us things I already know, but with a shocking and resolute honesty that brings tears to my eyes at just the right moment. Nabokov-a proud and confident writer with an exact knowledge of his gifts-once noted that he was good at putting "the right word in the right place." His flair for le mot juste, Flaubert's term for this brilliant selectivity, gives his prose a dizzying, almost supernatural quality. But there is cruelty lurking behind the pristine words that his genius and imagination have given him.

To better understand what I call Nabokov's cruelty, let us look at the passage in which Humbert pays a visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam-just to kill some time, shortly before Lolita so cruelly (and rightfully) leaves him. This is an old provincial barber with the gift of gab, and as he shaves Humbert he prattles on about his baseball-player son. He wipes his glasses on the apron over Humbert and puts down his scissors to read clippings about the son. Nabokov brings this barber to life in a few miraculous sentences. To us in Turkey he is as familiar as if he lived here. But at the last moment, Nabokov plays his last and most shocking card. Humbert takes so little interest in the barber that not until the last minute does he realize that the son in the newspaper cuttings died thirty years earlier. 

In two sentences-sentences that took two months to perfect Nabokov evokes a provincial barbershop and the garrulous barber's boasts about his son with an élan and an attention to detail worthy of Chekhov (a writer whom Nabokov explicitly admired); then, having drawn the willing reader into the melodrama of the "dead son," he immediately drops it and we return to Humbert's world. We understand from this cruel and satirical rupture that our narrator has not the least interest in the barber's woes. What's more, he is assured that, because we too are caught up in Humbert's amorous panic, we will dwell on the barber's son, who has been dead for thirty years, no more than he does. And so we share the guilt for the cruelty that is beauty's price. In my twenties I always read Nabokov with a strange sense of guilt and with a Nabokovvian pride at developing a shield against that guilt. This was the price I paid for the beauty of the novels and also for the pleasure I took from them.

To understand Nabokov's cruelty and its beauty, we must first remember how cruelly life treated Nabokov. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he was dispossessed of his estates and all his wealth after the Bolshevik revolution. (Later he would proudly claim indifference.) Leaving Russia for Istanbul (where he stayed one day in a Sirkeci hotel) he went first to live in exile in Berlin; from there he went to Paris, emigrating to America after the Germans invaded France. Though he perfected a literary Russian in Berlin, once in America he lost his mother tongue. His father, a liberal politician, was destroyed by a botched murder like the one described with such satirical heartlessness in Pale Fire. Coming to America in his forties, he lost not just his mother tongue but his father, his patrimony, and his family, whose members were spread across the world. If we do not wish to judge him too harshly for his curious brand of malice-what Edmund Wilson called "kicking the underdog"-or the pride with which he eschewed all interest in politics, or the way he ridiculed and even degraded ordinary people for their coarse manners and kitsch tastes, we must bear in mind the losses that Nabokov suffered in real life, particularly in relation to the great compassion he showed his heroes and heroines, like Lolita, Sebastian Knight, and John Shade.

As is clear from his description of the Kasbeam barber, Nabokov's cruelty emerges in finely detailed expositions which show that nothing in life-in nature, in other people, in our surroundings, our streets, our cities-answers to our pains, to our troubles. This awareness reminds us of Lolita's remark about death ("you are completely on your own"), which her stepfather also admired. The deep joy in reading Nabokov comes from our seeing the cruel truth: Our lives do not fit at all into the logic of the world. Having come to terms with this truth, we can begin to appreciate beauty for its own sake. Only when we have discovered the deep logic governing the world-the world we can appreciate only through great literature-can we be consoled by the beauty in our hands; in the end, our only defense against life's cruelties is Nabokov's fine symmetries, his self-referential jokes and mirror games, his celebration of light (to which this always exceedingly self-aware writer referred to as a "prismatic Babel"), and his prose, as beautiful as the fluttering wings

of a butterfly: After losing Lolita, Humbert tells the reader that all he has left is words and, in a half-mocking way, talks airily of "love as the last refuge."

The price of admittance to this refuge is cruelty, which gives rise to such feelings of guilt as I've described. Because Nabokov's prose owes its beauty to cruelty, it is crippled with the same guilt, and so too is Humbert as he searches for timeless beauty with all the innocence of a small child. We sense that the author-the narrator, the speaker of this wondrous prose-is forever trying to conquer this guilt, which quest only fuels his fearless cynicism, his brilliant diatribes, and his frequent returns to the past, to his memories of childhood.

As we can see in his memoirs, Nabokov looked back on his childhood as a golden age. Though writing with the example of Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in mind, Nabokov shows no interest in the sort of guilt that Tolstoy derived from Rousseau. It is clear that for him guilt is a pain that came after childhood, after the Bolsheviks forced him from his Russian idyll, a pain he was suffering at the time he was honing his style. "If all Russian writers write about their lost childhoods," Pushkin once said, "who will speak of Russia itself?" Though Nabokov is a modem instance of the tradition of which Pushkin was complaining-the literature of the landowning aristocrat-there is a great deal more to him than that.

Nabokov's quarrels with Freud, and the pleasure he took in needling him, suggest that he was trying to defend himself against the terrible guilt he felt about the golden age of his childhood. To put it differently, he was trying to protect himself from prohibitions and pronouncements of guilt and not from Freud's idiocies (as Nabokov himself described them). For when he began to write about time, memory, and eternity and his pages on these themes are among his most brilliant-Nabokov was also attempting sorcery of a Freudian sort.

Nabokov's concept of time offers an escape from the cruelty that attends beauty and engenders guilt. As he elaborates the concept at length in Ada, Nabokov reminds us that our memories allow us to carry our childhood with us, and with it the golden age we thought we had left behind. Nabokov brings this simple, self-evident idea into being with a fine lyricism, showing how the past and the present can coexist in a single sentence. The encounters with belongings evoke the past at the most unexpected moments; the images are laden with wondrous memories, opening our eyes to the golden age that is always with us, even in the and unhappy character) becomes the victim of Nabokovian cruelty, excluded from the major scenes in the book and from the great love that many readers feel for it.

This is the point at which the author's greatness depends on the reader's. As Nabokov struggles to bring his paradise into our own times-to create for himself a refuge from reality-his will to indulge his private jokes and puns, his secret pleasures and games, and to elaborate his awe at the boundlessness of the imagination-this impulse produces moments in Ada when he loses the impatient reader. This is the point at which Proust, Kafka, and Joyce also refuse their readers, but unlike these other writers, Nabokov, father of the post-modem joke, has foreseen the reader's response and so embroils him in a game: He speaks of the difficulty of Van's philosophical novel, of how "in the drawing groom prattle among fan-wafting ladies" he is viewed as conceited for his indifference to literary fame. 

In my youth, when everyone around me expected novelists to engage in social and moral analysis, I used this proud Nabokovian stance as my shield. Seen from Turkey, the characters in Ada and in Nabokov's other novels from the 1970s looked like fantasies of a nonexistent world "cut off from the present." Fearing I might be smothered by the cruel and ugly demands of the social milieu in which I planned to set my novels, I felt a moral imperative to embrace not just Lolita but also the books like Ada, in which Nabokov took to the outer limit his puns, sexual fantasies, erudition, literary games, self-referential jokes, and taste for satire. This is why for me great literature lives in a nearby place, cooled by the alienating wind of guilt. Ada is a great writer's attempt to eradicate that guilt, to use the power and will of literature to bring paradise into the present. This is why, once you lose your faith, in this book and in the incestuous union of Van and Ada, the book is drowned in a sin that is the opposite of what Nabokov intended. 

Pamuk: Other Colors