30. Lolita: Nabokov’s Twisted Masterpiece?

Who was Vladimir Nabokov? Why is Lolita so controversial? And, what was the reaction to its publication? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the story behind Lolita, and the novel itself. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier and Josh Smith Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:18Speaker 04

  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul. Lolita. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth. Lolita. She was low, plain low in the morning, standing four foot 10 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.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  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, an initial girl child in a Princeton 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. So there we have the first words of Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, first published in 1955. And it's one of the best known books of the 20th century. It's seen as a masterpiece of postmodern literature.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  It is ironic and knowing and playful and exquisitely written, in my view. Every page, every paragraph is full of tricks and puzzles and allusions. And surveys of writers and critics usually rank it as one of the greatest books ever written. But that's definitely not the only reason it's so well-known. There is, of course, a slightly contentious subject matter. Because even before it came out, it was hugely controversial. Five American publishers refused to touch it. It was effectively banned in Britain and France. And it's still banned to this day from schools in some parts of America. Why? Dominic, tell us.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Hi, everybody. That introductory reading, which I know you've been itching to do. You were saying before we started recording for years, Tabby.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  I can't tell you how excited I was when you said that I could do the opening reading today because I've always been, I mean mesmerized by that writing, that opening writing. And I used to know it by heart and I'd kind of like mutter it to myself and I don't know, slightly unnerving fashion.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's very creepy.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Because I just, it's this incredible, like rich, red prose. And you know exactly what he means. But anyway, more on that later.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Humbert Humbert, a narrator, for all his brilliance and for all his wordplay, for all his kind of clever, knowing allusions, he is a predatory paedophile. And the story of the book, for people who don't know, is how Humbert Humbert, a professor of French literature, an expert in French literature. He moves to New England. This is in the 1950s. And he becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl called Dolores Hayes. And this is the girl that he calls Lolita. He lodges with her widowed mother, Charlotte Hayes, whom he later marries because she's fallen in love with him. Charlotte Hayes, the mother, dies in freak car accident. And Humbert Humbert takes Dolores out of summer camp. And he takes her to a hotel called The Enchanted Hunters, which is a motif that runs through the book.

• 5:34Speaker 05

  And he begins a sexual relationship with her. They settle in another town. He poses as her father. He sends her to a private school. But eventually they run away from there as well. And they go on this massive road trip across the United States, staying in all sorts of sort of strange hotels and motels.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Motels feature prominently in this story.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Loads of motels. If you like motels, this is the book for you.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think if you liked motels before, you're not going to after reading Lolita.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true. So Humbert becomes convinced that they're being followed. Dolores falls ill and he takes her to hospital. She disappears. He assumes she's been kidnapped by this mysterious man who he thinks has been following them. And in the final pages of the book, Humbert manages to track down Dolores sometime later. And he also hunts down her kidnapper, whom he believes to be a man called Claire Quilty, whom he sees as his demonic kind of arch enemy. And Humbert is determined to win Dolores back and to kill Quilty. And if you've read the book, then you will know how those two sort of missions play out.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Surreal showdown. I mean, obviously it's a book by its very nature that plunges into some of the darkest corners of the human psyche. And it kind of invites you to explore parts of a man that you would not wish to and also slightly to sympathize with him. But we'll, we'll talk on that more later. Because he is a child abuser. He's a rapist. He's a murderer. He's a liar. He seems also to be psychopathically indifferent to the feelings of others. And obviously, you know, what he is describing in elegant, elaborate prose is one of the worst crimes anyone could possibly imagine. The corruption and enslavement of a 12-year-old girl.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  And then, and yet, as I just alluded to, Dominic, there is something particularly unsettling in the fact, in his voice, in how charming he is.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  Of course, of course. And actually, here's the thing, for a reader, I'm just going to put my cards on the table. For a reader, I think Lolita is one of the most exhilarating, pleasurable experiences you can have. So I've read it twice. And the second time that I read it, as soon as I finished, I thought, God, I cannot wait to read this again. I am seeing more and more in it every time. Every time you read it, there's something new in every line and every paragraph. There are so many puzzles and mysteries and so many rabbit holes to fall down. It's like the greatest crossword puzzle you've ever done. But also, it is so funny.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  You're so right. It's a total page turner. It's a thrill to read. It's a joy to read. I was actually gutted when I finished it. I wanted to start all over again. And it is brimming with Easter eggs, as you say. And I was kind of fascinated by the close observation of Humbert Humbert's kind of romantic, knowing romantic justification, but only paper thin of what is kind of a sick fetish. And you also feel Nabokov in the wings, watching you, watching him the whole time. And you're right, it is very, very funny. It was just a total thrill to read, I have to say.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  So anyway, we'll start with Nabokov himself because what a brilliant subject to do on the show. You know, we've done so many authors' lives, but his life really is so colorful, so rich and unexpected. So it's a book set in 1950s America. It's all about motels and it's all about 1950s consumerism. But his author's life could not have been more different. He was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. He was born into one of the richest and most prestigious Russian noble families. The Nabokovs, they trace their lineage back to the 14th century, to the Tatars, kind of, you know, medieval Russia, medieval Muscovy. His grandfather was Tsar Alexander II's Minister of Justice.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  His father, who was also called Vladimir, was a leading liberal politician, kind of a reformist politician in the last days of Nicholas II. And Vladimir, the author, was the eldest child of his parents. So his dad had married the heiress to a gold mine and he was their favourite. And he grew up in this magnificent kind of townhouse, this mansion in St Petersburg. And they've got a country estate outside the city. They've got dozens of servants. He's got a chauffeur that drives him to school every day. He grows up multilingual. So he actually learned to read and write English before Russian, which his father, a Russian patriot, was a bit disappointed by, which is really interesting. He wrote a brilliant memoir about this called Speak Memory, which

• 10:09Speaker 05

  is all about the last days of the Tsars and his, you know, his memory of his childhood and stuff. It's wonderful.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  I'd love to read that because I've always been fascinated by that kind of, it was, it was a time outside of time, those gilded lives, you know?

• 10:22Speaker 05

  That's exactly it. There are some critics who said, you know, when you read Lolita or any of Nabokov's American books, it's a cry of anguish from somebody who's lost this wonderful world. And it's horrified by where they've, they've ended up because it's all gone so horribly wrong.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  The Wendy's and diners of 1950s America versus kind of the Faberge eggs and the ice rinks and the

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  fur mufflers of, of St Petersburg. God.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. So he, you know, up to the point when he's about 17 or so, he thinks that's going to continue forever. He's inherited a country estate himself from his uncle. He's inherited a fortune worth millions of pounds today. He's a very bright boy. He's reading all of this English literature, isn't he? And, and he met some incredible people when he was young.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  There's something quite lampadusa about this, you know, again, young boys, very, very well read, love English writers, you know, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, but also then the Russians like Tolstoy and Pushkin. So when he was nine or 10, I think this is amazing, he and his father met Tolstoy whilst out walking. And then when he was 14, and I can just see frothing at the mouth with excitement over this, H.G. Wells came to dinner in their St Petersburg mansion.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  That's brilliant.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  What a literary, intellectual upbringing.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  And then he's in some motel in Colorado.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  So he, he was writing stuff, wasn't he? Was he writing poems? That's it, I think.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Mostly romantic poems, yeah, modeled on the 19th century French poetry, which he has privately published. But his real passion is butterflies. It's an obsessive hobby since he was about seven and it carries on throughout his life. And it's a theme that often finds its way into his work, as does another absolutely fascinating and unique quirk of his, which is the fact that he has synesthesia. And this is where you attribute colours to words, letters, and sometimes numbers.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  You've mentioned this before on the show, your own, you likened yourself to Nabokov.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  You know what? Please, please feel free to ask me about myself.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Sure. So the synesthesia, which I, by the way, think is made up.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  I knew you would. Oh, ye of no imagination.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  I think it is the kind of thing that somebody says to make themselves sound interesting.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  But God, doesn't it make me sound interesting?

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Well, does it? That's the question.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  This is like my calling card. This was, this is how I always led on first dates. So like, like, what do you associate with the word interesting?

• 12:56Speaker 05

  So like, what's your own name? What colour is your own name?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Yellow.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  Yellow?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  Tabitha is a yellow name.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Tabitha is a very yellow word. Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  What about Dominic?

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Dominic's a very green word for me. Sorry, just in case no one knows, I too have this fascinating, this fascinating artistically given affliction. I have synesthesia. The very interesting thing about this, though, is that you can often see, or at least I can often see, I think, the way that he uses colour in his writing. So that opening line, Lolita, the tip of the tongue, all of that, it's very kind of deep red writing. And his wife, who we will come to in a bit, she also had synesthesia. And so when she would edit his manuscripts or look over his manuscripts, apparently, you know, it helped her to understand.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  This is a bit blue, this section. This is a bit yellow or whatever.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, maybe, maybe.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Back to Nabokov. So then in 1917, everything he knew, his whole world falls completely apart because the Tsar is kicked out in the February Revolution and his father as a leading figure in the Liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. So he briefly becomes secretary to the new provisional government. But then when the Bolsheviks seize power in the autumn, then Nabokovs have to flee St Petersburg, added, as did so many of those families, you know, later sort of whites, I guess I would, you know, parts of the white army.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  So they ended up in the Crimea. Nabokov Senior became part of the kind of white administration there. The white armies crumble. Nabokov Senior decides, right, we've got to get, we've got to get out. And they go to England. And obviously for Vladimir, young Vladimir, this is unbelievably traumatic.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  But can you imagine, you know, from palaces and servants doing everything for you, you have a palace and you don't even know it. You know, a lot of these people didn't even know how money worked. They never had to use it to kind of a one room place with your whole family and you're still wearing these extraordinary clothes. I mean, it's.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. The classic thing of like jewels sewn into your fur coat or something.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's oddly, tragically comedic in some ways, I think.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  I suppose there was something slightly forlorn about the Russian exiles.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that come to London.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  So he goes to Cambridge. He studies zoology and languages. He wrote about this in his first English language novel, which is the real life of Sebastian Knight. He sort of makes the best of it. He plays a lot of football and tennis and chess and whatnot, and obviously reading a lot of literature. Now, his father, meanwhile, has moved the family to Berlin. And lots of Russian exiles at the beginning of the 20s were in Berlin. And eventually Vladimir went and joined them. And now a really important moment that finds its way into all his books, I think, and including Lolita. In March 1922, his father went to a lecture with the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, the cadets, as they were called, a guy called Pavel Milukov. And during the lecture, Milukov was attacked by ultra monarchists.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  So people further to the right, also exiled, but who blamed the liberals for basically opening the door to the Bolsheviks. There were two of these guys and they were armed with revolvers. And in the melee, Nabokov Senior tried to stop them and was shot through the heart and killed. That's Vladimir's father.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  What a way to lose your father after the drama of losing your homeland and everything. And then that.

• 16:03Speaker 05

  I know. Mad. And so that incident, this idea of people walking around with revolvers, planning to kill you, to assassinate you, that's in Lolita, that is in Pale Fire, it's in so many of Nabokov's stories and things, you know, it's a kind of obsession for him and you can absolutely understand why.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  But what this means is, is that Nabokov himself is now left as head of the family. And they stay in Berlin and he becomes a leading emigre writer. He's quite, again, this reminds me of Lampadusa, he's quite a lonely, melancholy figure. He sort of lives as many of those exiles do in a bubble of other Russian emigres. He doesn't like Berlin. He doesn't speak much German or know many Germans. Then in 1925, he gets married to Vera Slornim from a Jewish family, actually becomes a very, very famous literary marriage. The fact that she's Jewish is not an issue for him because his father had been an outspoken supporter of Russian Jews. She becomes his everything, his driver, his secretary, his

• 17:02Speaker 04

  typist. They have one son, Dmitri, and he became a very prominent translator, interestingly. But at this time, he's writing under the pen name Vladimir Siren. Now, the siren is a fantastical bird from Russian folktales based on the siren. And I think that's quite telling. This is a writer who loves deceptions and tricks in all of his work. And obviously the siren is not what it appears. And then he's writing short stories, novels, everything in Russian. They have, of course, no money. So he would write in a bathroom of their apartment using a suitcase resting on a bidet as a desk so as not to wake the baby Dmitri. And then, of course, the Nazis come to power. And at first Nabokov is totally oblivious.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  You know, like quite, you know intellectuals that are like that. And he says to his friends, I'm writing my novel. I do not read the papers. But of course, the Nazis are not going to like his wife Vera, who was a Russian Jew. She is in danger. So in 1937, they moved to Paris. And it's there that he writes his final Russian novel, The Enchanter. And interestingly, this is the first version of Lolita that we will ever see. And then in May nineteen forty, Paris is about to fall to the Germans, they move again, and this time they go to America. And it's just as well as that they did, because his brother Sergey stayed on in France, and he died in a Nazi concentration camp. You know, it's such a dramatic period of time, the Russian Revolution, a second war.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  And he seems to be, you know, the Nabokov seemed to be battered in the winds of all of it.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  And then they wash up in America, and he has to start all over again. And he does have emigre connections. And they introduce him to a very well-known critic called Edmund Wilson. And Wilson befriends him, and then basically introduces him to the editors of various, you know, The Atlantic or The New Yorker or something, so he can do some reviewing. He actually loves the butterflies of America, so he's making these long expeditions with Vera, and he's doing stuff about butterflies for like, the Harvard Museum of Natural History or whatever.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  See, I think that's, that's great, but I don't, I don't, I think it's something quite creepy about the way butterfly lovers pin their butterflies.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. And the sort of really weird thing, I saw, I was reading up on this, Nabokov's absolute specialism was the male genitalia of butterflies.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  So he makes these expeditions with Vera all over America, and continues to do so in the summer, he would go to Colorado and New Mexico or something. And that finds its way into Lolita, these trips. This is the sort of, you know, he bases some of Lolita on these butterfly collecting trips.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  He teaches at a number of universities, then he ends up permanently at Cornell, which is in Ithaca, in upstate New York. He becomes a big star on the campus, lots of people love his lectures. He does this lecture called Masterpieces of European Fiction, and hundreds of students will go, because he's got really unexpected and very opinionated judgments and things. Very unusually for a critic in the nineteen forties and fifties, he says to the students, you know, literature has no moral purpose. A writer who's preaching to you and giving you a moral message, you know, they're no good. Literature is, as he, as he says of Lolita in nineteen fifty-six, he says, for me, a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  So like Oscar Wilde's, and Oscar Wilde and his aesthetics.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, a little bit, actually. And he did love Oscar Wilde. I mean, he really liked Oscar Wilde. So he's now started publishing in English. He does The Real Life of Sebastian in nineteen forty-one, and then Ben Sinister in nineteen forty-seven.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  He translates personally most of his other Russian, his Russian novels, doesn't he? Because he doesn't trust other people to put across, because he writes with such precision, he doesn't trust someone else to convey that.

• 20:43Speaker 05

  That's right. Somebody did it, an early one, and he didn't like it, and he said, never again, I have to do them myself. You know, there are two faces to his career, the Russian and the English, but there's a definite continuity between them. So shifting identities, people playing chess, doubling.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  Dodgy emigres.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, emigres, colours, all the old synaesthesia stuff, puzzles, riddles, all of that, they recur in all of his books. And obviously, what also runs through them is this very, very dark sense of humour. I mean, we've done some cynical writers, we did Lampedusa and The Leopard, it seems like a cynical writer. But Nabokov sometimes seems so dark. So there was a translator and scholar at Oxford called Ronald Hingley, and he said about Nabokov's books, they have about as much milk of human kindness as a cornered black mamba, which I think is a nice line. And Martin Amis, who loved Nabokov, Nabokov was the laureate of cruelty, he was wise to it, he knew its special intonations.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  And actually, how cruel Lolita is as a book, is something that we'll talk about, I guess, in the second half.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  So how does this Russian intellectual exile come to get the idea for Lolita? It's a book that makes him a celebrity, but it's also one of the most controversial books ever written. So there's various theories about its origins. The first one, incredibly, is that there was actually a short story entitled Lolita Before by an obscure German writer called Heinz von Lickberg, and that was published in nineteen sixteen. And it tells the story of a middle-aged narrator who stays in this house as a lodger, becomes obsessed with a pre-teen girl called Lolita, who lives in the house. And then some critics suggest that Nabokov read this in Berlin, and was kind of either

• 22:31Speaker 04

  consciously inspired by it, or that he read it, forgot it, and then was unconsciously inspired by it. Or it could be a total coincidence, who knows? Then there's the slightly dark possibility that it was inspired by his own experience, because in his book, in his memoir, Speak Memory, there's a passage about how his uncle, Ruker, a diplomat, and he says, when I was eight or nine, he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and fondle me with crooning sounds and fancy endearments. Obviously, Nabokov felt deeply embarrassed by this. His father was very angry when he saw him, he took him outside. He asked, as in, his uncle to come outside. And then, but this, nevertheless, it carried on until, you know, Nabokov was a teenager.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  And then, one day, you know, when he was a bit older, and this is, again, this is something, a motif that appears in Lolita, his uncle seemed disappointed in him and said, how sallow and ugly you are now, and stopped, and Humbert remarks upon that point at which a girl is no longer attractive to him. And then there was another very real life, very dark, real-life story, possibly behind the book. Because in the book, Humbert himself mentions the case, and it is the case of Sally Horner, who was an eleven-year-old girl kidnapped in nineteen forty-eight by a guy called Frank LaSalle, who was a fifty-one-year-old mechanic and sex offender who pretended to be a member of the FBI to make her do what he wanted for, you know, years. And it's a horrendous story.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  He travelled across America with her for twenty-one months, claiming to be her father under various aliases, and then even, you know, once he was imprisoned, he still claimed that he was her father, and very, very dark. So, but Nabokov denied that Lolita was in any way based on this case. People have said, since his death, that it surely, surely was, but he always denied it in his lifetime, because, but the parallels are striking. You know, the fact that Humbert asks, had I done to Dolly perhaps what Frank LaSalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner? I mean, surely that's a bit of a giveaway.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, he mentions it himself, exactly.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  But then Nabokov's own explanation, so he wrote this afterward in nineteen fifty-six, and he says, really interestingly, he said, I got the idea just before the Second World War, thirty-nine or forty, I read a newspaper story about an ape in the botanical garden in Paris. And this ape, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoalled by an animal. This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I read this in the foreword, and I was really confused.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now, I think, is the ape Lolita, or is the ape Humbert? And what we have is his sketching of the, I was thinking possibly the ape is Humbert, and what his Lolita is.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  I actually thought Lolita.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Okay, well, there you go, interesting.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  But he does make play throughout the book with this period's infatuation and fascination with psychoanalysis, and all these experiments going into, you know, what is man and the human psyche. So I don't know, maybe it's just an extension of that? Maybe he's tricking us? I don't know.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  Maybe it's one of his tricks. So anyway, you mentioned he wrote The Enchanter, so this is one of the last things he wrote in English, kind of a novella, I guess. And the story of The Enchanter is there's a, a, a middle-aged jeweler, and he lusts after this teenage girl. He marries her sick mother. The mother dies, he takes the girl on a road trip, they go to the French Riviera. On their first night, he makes a move on her. She wakes up, she screams, and the main character, he runs out, and he throws himself under a truck and kills himself. So this is, you know, the first version, as you said earlier, of Lolita, really. But he never published it. It was thought for a long time to have been destroyed, but then after his death in nineteen eighty-six, his son Dimitri actually published it.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  So anyway, he'd obviously written this first version, and then he couldn't, he couldn't leave it alone, he couldn't give up on the theme. So nineteen forty-seven, he wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, and he said, I'm writing a short novel about a man who liked little girls, and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea. Now, in your reading, you had that line, the Princeton by the sea?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 05

  And we'll come back to the Kingdom by the Sea, because it has a, you know, important meaning. Takes him ages to write it, though. And I think part of that is because it's so carefully patterned. But also, it takes him so long, because Nabokov said, I need to invent America, to put a little bit of average reality into the brew of individual fancy. So basically, you know, he needs to create an American world for his book, as he'd created a French one, or an English one, or whatever, a German one, for his previous books. And so what he does is, it's interesting, he would ride around, I mean, people must have thought he was an absolute lunatic, he would ride around on public buses in Ithaca, New York, and he would be copying down the slang that he heard from the kind of pre-teen kids or the teenagers.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess, like, for a Russian emigre, it's just world-building, isn't it?

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  Because you don't understand this world at all.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  How else are you gonna know? And, and to be fair, Dolores Lolita does sound very authentic.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and when we talk about her later, I think that's a big part of her characterization.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  He went to a school, and he went to meet the principal, and he said, I've got a daughter, I'd like to enroll her in the school.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Quite Humbert behaviour.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  That's very Humbert behaviour, and actually, there's, and one of my favourite bits of the book is when Humbert goes to meet the headmistress, Miss Pratt, in, in the second half of the book. He bought the Girl Scout manual, he bought gun catalogues, and he studied them closely for kind of, because he was going to incorporate them. And of course, he's going on these annual butterfly trips down to the Rockies, and he would keep notes on all the motels he went to, because he's going to incorporate all that in the book as well.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  It definitely pays off. Anyway, he finishes the book in December nineteen fifty-three, and initially, he plans to publish it anonymously because of the subject matter, but five American publishers turn it down. An editor at Viking says, we would all go to jail if this thing were published. It made me wonder, I wonder if they appreciated what a beautiful thing it was, but just thought, subject matter, no.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  I think some of them did, actually, supposedly some of them did, and they said, it's an amazing book.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  It's a shame.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  But, you know, it's a shame you've written it about a paedophile, because basically, we can't publish it.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  That's the kind of thing that I slightly suspect would have amused Nabokov. Anyway, so in the end, he turns to a French publisher, Olympia Press, he actually doesn't realise that they specialise in trashy erotica, and the bloke who runs it is in fact himself very dodgy. He thinks the Humbert is based on Nabokov, and that the book is pro paedophilia.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, terrible.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Which is a bit unnerving. And anyway, so it's published in September nineteen fifty-five, under Nabokov's name in Olympia's Travellers' Companion.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  This is a bit like in The Wind of the Willows, people saying, oh, this just isn't good biology. Animals wouldn't brush their teeth or whatever.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  This is, if you want a guidebook to America, use Humbert's version. Anyway, Traveller's Companion, erotica series. Hence, the reputation Lolita has for being pornographic, which, by the way, it absolutely is not. At first, there were no reviews and it gets very little attention. Then, at the end of 1955, old beloved friend of the show, Graham Green, writes about it in The Sunday Times and says it is one of the best books of the year. And this kicks off all the controversy because the British Home Office tells customs officers to confiscate imported copies and then the French follow suit. And in both countries, it's basically banned for years, for a couple of years.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  And actually, in some other, I mean, in New Zealand and, I don't know, Australia and places, it was also effectively banned. And it didn't actually come out in America until three years later, so in August 1958. And this is actually an insane story, which we could spend hours talking about. Basically, a former showgirl called Rosemary Ridgewell read an extract from the book. And she had it lying around when her lover, who was Walter Minton, the publisher, this New York publisher, it's called G.P. Putnam Sons, he came around and she said, look at this, this is brilliant, you should, I think you should publish this.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  The girl had an eye.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  And, and then this was reported in the newspapers and his wife was really furious. Basically, his wife found out that he was having an affair with the showgirl.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Through Lolita, oh my god.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  And then, if you want a really mad story, they went out for dinner with the Nabokovs and his wife said to Vera Nabokov.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  What, the mistress?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  No, the wife, right? This is a mad story. They went out for dinner with the Nabokovs. So the mistress didn't go, right? The wife is basically saying to Vera Nabokov, oh, it's a very difficult situation. I've discovered that my, my husband is carrying on with the showgirl. Because another of his mistresses, a gossip columnist, wrote about it. Mad.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  No way. But we should be doing a podcast about this guy.

• 31:10Speaker 05

  Now, here's the twist, right?

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Sounds fantastic.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Dmitri Nabokov arrived at this dinner in a sports car to take them home, or something like this. The disappointed wife said, I'll come with you in a sports car, looks like a good car. The others went back by taxi to their hotel. The others got back to their taxi. So this is the publisher and the Nabokovs. The wife is nowhere to be seen. Why? Because Dmitri Nabokov has taken her back to his apartment and they've spent like the evening together.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  She's having her revenge.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  She's having her revenge with Nabokov's son.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  I admire that immensely.

• 31:43Speaker 05

  What a mad story that is.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  She's punishing both her husband and Lolita. Excellent.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  I mean, a crazy story. Anyway, and it was also all this, this bloke publishes the book. It's a massive hit. It sold 100,000 copies in three weeks. Now, a few reviewers didn't like it. So there's a reviewer called Orville Prescott, inevitably, from The New York Times, who said it was dull, dull, dull, in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  This makes me think that, like you, he doesn't read all the books that he reviews or something, because it is so.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  Tabby, that is so untrue.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  That is untrue. Because it is so not dull.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  No, I know.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Nor is it florid. It's perfectly balanced.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  You like King's Les Mis, and I like King's Les Mis. He was so wrong about this. He said it's bad as a work of art and morally bad. We've done lots of books on the show where critics at the time didn't get it. Actually, most critics at the time said this is obviously brilliant. And the most common comment is not how shocking it is, it's how funny it is. Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times, says it's one of the funniest books she's ever read. Robert Kirsch in The Los Angeles Times, interesting comparison, actually. If you like Henry Fielding or Laurence Stern, if the comic novel of the 18th century appeals to you, you're in for a treat. Lolita is a small masterpiece, an almost perfect comic novel. I mean, it's interesting that that's what they zone in on, the humour of it.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  If you read it as someone wryly kind of cocking an eyebrow at you throughout and, and sort of watching you to see how much you shiver, you know, how, how, how, how, how much you squeal.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  There is something amusing about it. He's always in on a joke that you are only just understanding.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  I think that's true. Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  And, and then, um, there's the film, isn't there? Stanley Kubrick buys the film rights. It's such a Stanley Kubrick project, I would say. And it becomes a cult film in 1962 with James Mason, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers. And then there's another version in the 1990s, which I've seen with Jeremy Irons.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  So I've never seen that.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  I actually think it's very good. He gets Humbert, Jeremy Irons. It quickly becomes enshrined as one of the undisputed masterpieces of the age. You know, giving myself away, I think rightly so.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Today, it comes up again and again in polls and surveys of writers and critics across the world. And that would very much please Nabokov, I think, who always said that this book was his special favourite.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, he said it left him with the most pleasurable afterglow because it's the purist, the most abstract and carefully contrived. And actually, this issue of how carefully contrived it is, you know, goes to the heart of its appeal, I think. The fact that, you know, every single syllable is so really meticulously calculated, isn't it? The most important thing about this book in many ways, this will sound odd to people who haven't read it and, you know, horrified by the subject matter, the abiding thing, I think, is the style, because it's the style that defines it, isn't it?

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Definitely. So Nabokov said, all my stories are webs of style. For me, style is matter. Because obviously, it's the ugliest subject imaginable. A paedophile who marries a widow and basically sort of drives her towards her death. Her death is an inevitability. So he can molest her 12-year-old daughter, with whom he is kind of in his own mind in love with. But those are the facts. And then he kidnaps this daughter and, you know, takes her from school, takes her on a massive road trip, and she serves basically as a sex slave. And then he goes mad and then shoots somebody in his own home. And yet, and yet, that is not what you remember about Lolita. I think if you describe Lolita to someone, that's

• 35:19Speaker 04

  not even what you would say. It's the style. It's this clever, flamboyant, funny writing. Big claim here, I think it's the most beautifully written book in the entire English language. As Humbert Humbert put it in the intro reading, you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. You see, he's kind of laughing at you again there. He's laughing at himself. Right from the first pages, the book is alive with wordplay and puns and jokes and hidden meanings. There are allusions, quotations, references. I mean, he's so literary. He's so well-informed. You know, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, French writers like Flaubert, Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire. There's lots of classical allusions as a way to kind of

• 36:04Speaker 04

  justify his fetish and root it in something that was what, you know, that was deemed permissible in a different time. But he also knows that he's kind of making play with that.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Of course. Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  It's parodies of textbooks, medical books, adverts, also savage character sketches. It's incredibly lush, beautiful landscape descriptions, physical descriptions. Yeah, it's magnificent.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  And every sentence, I mean, the multiple meanings, that the sense of, you know, you're in the middle of this massive riddle. So Nabokov gave an interview for Playboy. I mean, that's not as creepy as it sounds because loads of writers used to do interviews for Playboy in those days.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, top literary journal.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Exactly. And he said Lolita was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle. It's composition and it's solution at the same time. It's one as a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. And that theme of mirrors, we'll come back to this after the break, actually, the idea of doubling and the idea of things reflecting each other and being in a hall of mirrors is really important. And actually, it's a great example just as we go into the break. Your first voice you hear is not Humbert Humbert's voice.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is so strange.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  A fake foreword by a man who calls himself John Ray Junior.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  So Ray says that the author of this memoir, Humbert Humbert, died in legal captivity of coronary thrombosis on November 16th, 1952.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  It's so pompous.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  What is going on there? Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's so pompous. But obviously, he's telling us Humbert Humbert died, that he was about to be on trial.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Was in a mental asylum.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  Effectively, exactly. He was in a mental asylum or awaiting, and awaiting trial. And then there are clues throughout the, in the rest of the foreword, aren't there? Because Ray tells us what happened to some of the characters.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So for instance, there's actually a clue to Lolita's fate in there, when it says, Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbirth giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952, in Greystar, a settlement in the remotest northwest. And then, as you say, a clue to the multiple identities that are through the book because, so Vivian Darkbloom has written a biography, My Q, to be published shortly in critics who have perused the manuscript, call it her best book. So who is Vivian Darkbloom?

• 38:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Vivian Darkbloom, another character, you know, he's basically telling us what will happen to a character in the book. Vivian Darkbloom is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. And her book, My Q, is a reference to her literary colleague, Claire Quilty, who is a key figure in the book. So My Q, what, what is this book that this person who's got Vladimir Nabokov's name has written? Is it like another version of Lolita that's about Claire Quilty?

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Because there's a lot in common between Claire Quilty and Humbert. Are they arguably foils? Are they arguably the same person?

• 38:45Speaker 05

  Exactly. And that the whole foreword ends with John Ray Junior saying, you know, the point of Lolita, of publishing this, is to make all of us, parents, social workers, educators, apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  So cynical, wow.

• 39:06Speaker 05

  So cynical and sarcastic because Nabokov hates this kind of thing. He is mocking it.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  He hates moral writing. So of course.

• 39:14Speaker 05

  Anyway, that's the foreword. And then after the foreword, Tabby, we come at last to the narrator. One of the most striking voices in all fiction, that's Humbert Humbert.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is he a monster? Is he a madman? He's a supreme artist. He's a wit and intellectual. Or is he just a grubby child molester? What's the reality? Is he ever telling us the truth? Is the book just a sort of strange daydream that, you know, does half, does half of it not even happen? Can we trust a word that he says? We'll take you through Nabokov's hall of mirrors and try to solve at least some of the book's puzzles after the break.

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• 41:30Speaker 04

  Welcome back to the book club, where we are about to delve into some of the mysteries of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. But first, a very exciting quick reminder. If you'd like to learn more about the books and the writers we talk about, have all the inside knowledge on the show, and also be part of a thrilling, butterfly-loving literary community, then why not sign up to our totally free weekly newsletter, Book Club Notes? So just go to thebookclubhq.com to sign up.

• 42:01Speaker 05

  They're actually brilliant. They land in your own books.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  They genuinely are.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Every Saturday, they give you a sort of guide to the book. You can, you know, if you're running a book club, they give you talking points. They have loads of listener feedback. So for example, I don't know, Tabby, in the first half, you were claiming that you think Lolita is the most beautifully written book in the English language. Lots of listeners will have their own views about that. So if you subscribe to Book Club Notes, you can send in your thoughts. They'll be printed in the newsletter. You will be able to admonish Tabby. You'll be able to share your wisdom with other people.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Let me know why you agree with me.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  Right, or disagree. You can sign up through the link in the episode description, or you can go to thebookclubhq.com and it is of course totally free.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  And it is damn good, so I would truly recommend it.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  So 1950s-style American consumerist salesmanship over. We'll now get back to Lolita and to Humbert Humbert. So Humbert Humbert is one of the best-known unreliable narrators in all fiction, isn't he?

• 42:59Speaker 04

  You love an unreliable narrator, don't you?

• 43:01Speaker 05

  I do love an unreliable narrator, Tabby. It's one of my, you know, one of my quirks, one of my eccentricities.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  You're so kooky like that.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  It makes me really interesting.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, you've got to have something.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  So Humbert is obviously, we know from the beginning, he is consciously spinning us a story. But who are we? So he calls us a first, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and then he has various sort of spins on that. So at one point, he addresses us as frigid gentle women of the jury. At one point, he calls us Miranda.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  You know, he's just a fleeting reference. He addresses us as Miranda. And I think, I love that because that's just a small detail that most people would miss. But the implication there is that he is Prospero from The Tempest. And Prospero, as people will remember from Shakespeare's play, he is the magician, the enchanter, who is on a desert island, exiled with his daughter Miranda, and he's telling her stories about how they got there. And Miranda there is sort of standing in for Lolita, of course.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  But it's never just twofold or threefold or whatever. It's like just that reference alone. He's, you could read that as, oh, he's finding ways to romanticize what is a very dark act and root it in something literary and, you know, beautiful and endearing. But then you could also say, oh, well, Humbert is kind of hoodwinking us because that's how, what he thinks we think we, he is doing, when in fact, he is saying, well, I was pretending all along to be this little girl's father, when actually...

• 44:31Speaker 05

  When actually he wasn't.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  I was raping her, yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  And the tone of Humbert's narration right from the beginning, it is clever, knowing, blackly comic. So when he starts, he says, you know, "I was born in Paris, 1910. My father was a gentle, easygoing person, a salad of racial genes, a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent with a dash of the Danube in his veins." And then he says, "I'm going to pass around in a minute some lovely glossy blue picture postcards," like he's giving a presentation.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  But that's also, he's playing with Americanisms there as well. You know, it's very, you come back from Niagara Falls or whatever, and you say, "Honey, look at the photographs."

• 45:05Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  He's always mocking something.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  He is. I mean, he's even mocking his mother's death, right? A couple of years later, "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident." Brackets, picnic, lightning. I mean, that obviously is hilarious. Like, if your mother had been killed at a picnic by lightning, you wouldn't say, "picnic, lightning," in that offhand way. And then he goes on, "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'm writing under observation the sun of my infancy had set." So again, there, "if you can stand my style," the joke, "I'm writing under observation."

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  But then actually, the way it's written is, it's actually exquisite. The hollows and dells of memory and all that stuff.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Only the most dexterous writers, I think, are able to switch between this rich, flamboyant, traditional style and kind of quirky Americanisms and shifting between long sentences and shorts.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  Exactly. And between a very informal register and a very highfalutin one. So from picnic, lightning, to the hollows and dells of memory. So he goes on, he's telling us about his early life. In the introduction to the Folio edition, there's a critic called Michael Dirda, who wrote the introduction, he says, "This first chapter feels like a parody of kind of confessional writing. This is how I was born, this is where I grew up, and this is how I first fell in love. And this is the lost love that's going to drive the story." And in this case, the lost love is a teenage girl called Annabelle Lee that he met on the French Riviera.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  This is one of the only vaguely erotic scenes in the book, and it's when the two of them are snogging on the beach.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Because as I've said before, contrary to popular thought, Lolita is not a pornographic or sensual, you know, salacious book in any way at all. But her name, Annabelle Lee, it comes from Edgar Allan Poe's last complete poem, Annabelle Lee, which I loved as a child, actually, where the narrator is describing his love for a girl called Annabelle Lee, who lived in a kingdom by the sea, which is of course the original title for Lolita. And in the poem, their love is so intense that the angels were jealous and drove her to her death, but their love endures beyond the grave and their souls are still connected. And this is kind of the driver of the plot. Humbert is trying to recover, allegedly trying to recover the intensity of that first

• 47:28Speaker 04

  lost love, or at least that's what he wants us to think. Because again, he's making it romantic, he's adding an almost fairy tale quality to it. You know, he's saying that this sick infatuation with underage girls is nothing more than trying to recapture a moment of an erotic, beautiful moment in the past. Nothing more innocent than Annabelle Lee, you know, in Edgar Allan Poe. There's nothing purer than that. And then he claims it's this relationship that gives him an enduring obsession with what he calls, very famously, nymphettes. So he's kind of imbuing the sick fetish with allusions to doomed love, like Romeo and Juliet or something all over again.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  And so he says, "Between the age limits of nine and 14, there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature, which is not human but nymphic, that is demoniac. And these chosen creatures are proposed to designate as nymphettes." So another Easter egg here, bewitched travelers, that's a reference to The Enchanted Hunters that runs through the book. That is also, when I started this book, and this is basically the first chapter, this section, the first, once you get through the, the initial bit written by someone else, he's basically trying to explain and justify in a slightly mocking tone, his, you know, pedophilia, essentially.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  At times, he almost blames the nymphettes themselves, you know, because nymphs are quite flittish in Greek mythology and they're always kind of running away. But he's also, in the same way that you never really take the rapes that occur in Greek mythology very seriously, because they're just nymphs. It's a similar connotation there. And then he calls them Lolita at one point. So he's saying that they're demon children. They tempt him into wanting them. For instance, at one point, he talks about a nymphette girl who groped under his bench for a lost marble, like a come-on in a way. So it's inviting, it's always inviting him.

• 49:25Speaker 05

  Exactly. He implies throughout, doesn't he, that Lolita is...

• 49:28Speaker 04

  She's flirtatious.

• 49:30Speaker 05

  She's flirtatious and she is actually, let me later, as we will see, he claims that she's actually initiated their first real sexual encounter.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. And like he says, that he's driven crazy by their mixture of tender, dreamy childishness and wry vulgarity. So he, he does that very, very well.

• 49:46Speaker 05

  And he goes on, doesn't he, to give us this long lecture about nymphettes and how brilliant they are. And it's a sort of mad lecture, but it's also very, it is funny.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  It's classic Humbert. It is darkly self-reflective and charming and so funny.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  "This is all very interesting," he says at one point. "And I dare say, you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit, but no, I'm not. I'm just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddletop. Here are some more pictures." So anyway, he marries a woman called Valeria. He likes her because she gave, he put, he puts it, "an imitation of a little girl." But she runs off with a white Russian, doesn't she? Whose name, so names are going to slip all the time in the book. So at first Humbert calls him Mr. Taxovich, but then he finds out that his name is actually Mr. Maximovich. And he thinks about murdering Mr. Maximovich, doesn't he? But he doesn't do it.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. He's also ridiculously outraged at the fact that said wife has been unfaithful on him with said Maximovich, which is absolutely ridiculous, given that he's sort of horrible to her and hits her and thinks she's a big ugly lump and is fancying little girls from the sidelines. But the minute that she's unfaithful on him, he's... He's just furious.

• 50:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, he is.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  He can't believe it because he always also makes allusions to the fact that he thinks older women find him very attractive.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  He does. Yeah, he often says what a massive catch she is for older women.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  So then he's in that mental institutions, which is completely upfront about. And he finally ends up in this sort of almost caricature New England town called Ramsdale, which he says is a green and pink little, little town, which is his synesthesia, I think, Tabby.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  The fellas.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Totally a medically verified disorder.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  Of course, like, like yours. And there he meets Charlotte Hayes. So this is the woman with whom he lodges. And I have to say, I find everything to do with Charlotte Hayes immensely funny.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  But this is really where people say, God, Nabokov, you know, that cruelty is in his portrayal of Charlotte Hayes. And actually, all adult women, in comparison to kind of the freshness of the nymphets, all adult women come across as vile, contrived, plucked, swollen, make upped. And then the nymphs, the nymphets are so fresh. And again, in a similar way, he describes the way that men in falling in love with older women, he compares what he deems to be their blunt, unsophisticated lusts to the luscious beauty erotica of loving young girls. And so Charlotte Hayes is a classic case of that because she is a foil for the alluring Lolita.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  She is, absolutely. When he first meets her, he's so funny in the way he's so horrible about her. "I think I'd better describe her right away to get it over with," he says. "The poor lady was in her middle thirties. She had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows, and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlena Dietrich."

• 52:37Speaker 04

  I can't believe you said before the recording that I was Charlotte Hayes. Unbelievable.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Well, you're not, to be fair, you're not that far away in age. You're closer in age to her than you are to Dolores, that's for sure.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  You want to talk? Unbelievable.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  She was, and this is so you, "She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club."

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Again, again, pot, kettle, black.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  Or any other deadly conventuality.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  I love that, a deadly conventuality. I totally know what he means, you know?

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Women who are, women who are completely devoid of-

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Do you want to partake? Do you want to come and join the society? No, I fucking don't.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  Tabby, women who are completely devoid of humour, he says.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's fair.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  But then actually, talking about the humour, I think one of the funniest lines in the book, he describes how basically Mrs. Hayes has taken a massive fancy to him. And he's sort of, you can tell he's slightly smug about this, even though he finds her repellent. And he describes how he will sleep with Mrs. Hayes while thinking about her daughter.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Oh, see, it's quite twisted.

• 53:39Speaker 05

  And he says, "And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh, prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still an nymphet's scent that in despair I tried to pick up as I bade through the undergrowth of dark, decaying forests."

• 54:00Speaker 04

  You know what, though? It is something, he is testing you, Nabokov, because while I sit at home and I read this and I'm chuckling away to myself, on air, you know, I feel complicit in, in your dark sense of humour.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  My, it's not my dark sense of humour, just to be clear. It's Humbert Humbert and Vladimir Nabokov's. You're laughing at the undergrowth of dark, decaying forests.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  I am. That is what gets me every time, I have to say.

• 54:22Speaker 05

  Which I have to say, I mean, it must be the most ungallant thing a man could ever conceivably say about a woman. Anyway.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  The massive thigh, oh.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. Anyway, he's horrible to her, isn't he? And he actually is horrible to women generally.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Yes. He fantasises about drowning her, just as he fantasises about maiming his wife, Valeria. And then later in the book, he even hits Lolita in the face. So I quote, "Without a word, I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot, little, hard cheekbone." Again, I think, you know, you can still see his tender lust there, even as he's hitting her across the face. And there's a real relish in the way that he describes it. And yet, his is the only voice that we hear. And he's so clever and funny and charming and knowing and witty, that he does, as I just said, you know, that, that thing about maybe being complicit, he totally takes us with him.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  I was wondering at this point, whether you would say, I actually know as a woman, I don't think he always does take us, as a female reader, but you do feel-

• 55:25Speaker 04

  For me, I do feel that he does, because of the way, his Charlotte Hayes is the only Charlotte Hayes we ever meet. And she is ghastly in so many ways. Well, so she appears to him. And obviously, you know, we'll come, we'll come to discuss who Lolita really is outside of Humbert's gaze. It's very hard to know. But yes, I think Humbert totally does take us with him, even as you're as appalled as he lets you be, you're as appalled as he lets himself be. But he's laughing at the fact that he knows what he does is appalling, and so you sort of do too.

• 55:57Speaker 05

  The mad thing is that he take, well, I was about to say, the mad thing is that he takes you with him even though you're questioning his sanity the whole time.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  The whole time, yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  So he says multiple times, he's been in and out of mental institutions. There's a wonderful bit where he says, before he moves to New England, he says he was in this sanatorium and he used to trick the psychiatrists, cunningly leading them on, never letting them see, you know, all the tricks of the trade, inventing for them elaborate dreams, teasing them with fake primal scenes, and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament. And what I love about this, I think he's describing his literary method. I think that's what he is.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 05

  We, it's like, we are the psychiatrists who are falling for his tricks. He is leading us on. He is inventing scenes for us. He's playing games with us. And I love that.

• 56:42Speaker 04

  I found that bit very funny, the idea of leading on these kind of earnest, American doctors and stuff. I thought that was actually very amusing and, you know, playing into this period of, you know, the rise of psychoanalysis or all that, or whatever it may be.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, which Nabokov was very down on. He hated Freudianism.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Very, very down on, exactly. There was actually one moment, there are moments, though, when you are, you kind of come to an abrupt halt, though, and you sort of think, oh, God, that's actually pretty unsettling. Like, for instance, there's a moment when he has put Lolita into this school. It's when they're travelling around together. And he is, he is outside his window, his window looks onto a playground where he can watch other little-

• 57:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, I remember, yeah, yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  -nymphets playing. When stuff like that, you suddenly go, oof.

• 57:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, he is actually very creepy.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Yes, I would say on the whole, he does take you with him. And that's the thing, as you say, what he's doing there, I think that's his style altogether. His identity keeps slipping. His sense of self is very precarious. Even his background.

• 57:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  Slightly obscure, sorry, whereabouts in Europe is he from, you know?

• 57:44Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Where is an emigre from? Does his father really own a hotel? Stuff like that. So Humbert is never fixed. He seems out of place as an emigre, wherever he is. People can't pin him down. You know, he always has this dark, brooding effect on, on women, or so he says. He's always playing different parts, lodger, lover, stepfather, adoring father, you know? And, and he even lives that out. He enacts that. And then his name, so we actually learn that that's actually an alias, because it keeps shifting too. And it's actually one of the final paragraphs of the book, he says, that, you know, he kind of chose Humbert Humbert as his name. So we find out right at the end that we never really knew who he was anyway. So when he books into The Enchanted Hunters, the hotel where he first sleeps with

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Lolita, he can't decide what name to give. What should I put? Humbert and daughter? Humbert and small daughter? Humbert and immature girl? Humbert and child?

• 58:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  You know, he's, he's sort of faintly aware of being watched all the time.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  I mean, you know that bit that you read right at the beginning? "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." Her identity too is always shifting. She never has a fixed name. Actually, we never really see Lolita. Well, we just never see her in her own terms, do we? We never-

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's, like, for instance, that opening reading is so indicative, because right there, it's the different shadows of Humbert's attraction to her. Lola in slacks, she's irresistible. But then also, when she's Dolly at school, she's irresistible. It's all, it's all his infatuation. But yeah, you're right. We never really see her on her own terms. So when Humbert first sees her, he thinks she's the reincarnation of his lost love.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Annabelle Lee, yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  So, "Without the least warning, a blue," this is such a famous scene, by the way, this moment with the girl, you know, laid out on the grass, "without the least warning, a blue sea wave swelled under my heart. And from a mat in a pool of sun, half naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love, peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child, the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky, supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair, a polka dot, black kuchief tied around her chest, hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day."

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  I mean, the last bit is super creepy.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Super creepy.

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  But the paragraph, the two paragraphs are beautifully written.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  But also you see the way that he's making fun of himself there, as he often does, you know, "the lumbering Humbert, my aged ape eyes, in comparison to the luscious youth of Lolita splayed out in the sunshine." But you can also see from that why feminist readers would find this book so very unsettling. She's a 12-year-old girl, but she is constantly objectified. And it's not just that she's objectified, the things that make her a little girl are objectified. She never speaks for herself. She's never really given agency within the text. We don't get an insight into her inner life, no obvious sense of her feelings. So I guess the question is, is Lolita just a passive victim? I don't, so critics disagree. Many don't think so. They see her as the manipulator behind the

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  story. So there's a Canadian writer, Robertson Davies, who says, "The real story of Lolita is not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child."

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  Wow, that's punchy.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  That's damn punchy. Dorothy Parker, "It's the tragic tale of a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls, and falls for a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered." Is that too harsh? Yeah, I think that's far too harsh. But I don't think it's entirely the case either, that Lolita is allowed, allowed nothing of her own identity to shine through. Nor do I think that we don't ever get glimpses of her suffering, because I think that's important. I think Nabokov conveys that.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  We'll come to this- Later, won't we?

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Because the thing is about Lolita, of course, she is played up. The parts of her that Humbert finds attractive are played up. She does come across as very flirtatious, not just with Humbert, with other men. She's very much a teenage girl rooted in the capitalism of America in the 1950s. She loves candy, she wears her hair in pigtails, she loves clothes. She manipulates Humbert to get the things that she wants, you know, probably like a nice dress or whatever it is. She loathes her mother, so she plays that to her advantage in the way that maybe a young stepdaughter might. But she's always a little girl and her naivety comes across. And I think it's so revealing when there's this scene when she is watching her friend

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  with her mother and her family. And Humbert observes in her this deep sense of longing and sadness because she's never known a family, you know, she's actually never had a father. So I think that she doesn't understand the mania of Humbert's passion. She's just using him at first to get away from her mother. And then increasingly, she is upset and hurt and broken by everything that happens to her. She's a child who no doubt would never have envisaged where her life would take her. And I think there's something in her of, you know, those girls that get sucked into cults at young ages.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Too young to kind of get it on the stand at first and then is totally powerless.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  But don't you think, isn't it so interesting, though, that we're talking about Lolita as though she's a real person about this character?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  I mean, Martin Amis, who loved Lolita and loved Nabokov, wrote of, "We tend to forget that this blinding creation remains just that, a creation and a creation of Humbert. Humbert's. We have only Humbert's word for her."

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Speaker 05

  And I mean, you could say this of any literary character, couldn't you? That they are, of course, they're not real, right? I mean, but there are some books where you read them and you suspend your disbelief. You come to believe in the character as an autonomous, flesh and blood individual. So when they suffer, you know, you might be moved, you might cry, you might, you know, you're delighted when they have triumphs. You believe in them as real people, if only when you're reading the book. But in this case, I would say it's hard to, for me, anyway, it's hard to believe that Humbert, Humbert and Lolita are real, when the book is so knowing about its own status as a kind of literary artifact.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Definitely, but there are just moments where she's so realistically a teenage American girl, you know? But then I suppose Humbert, Humbert has made a study of them, just as Nabokov had made a study of America.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  And I guess you would trust it more if Lolita wasn't the object, the enduring object of Humbert's passion. So everything she does comes across as unnervingly sexy or whatever.

• 1:04:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  The thing that's always strange, and I think we'll come to that, is that we meet her in later life.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. And when she appears very different, I mean, might as well be a different person, I would say, from how she was before. But going back to the point about how the book is this sort of very knowing literary artifact, I think, I mean, I read it especially the second time. What struck me then was how much of a kind of massive literary game and a riddle and a puzzle it is. So Nabokov, in his afterword, which he wrote in 1956, wrote about the nerves of the novel, as he called them, the secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted. Like he's left these clues that will allow you to uncover. And he lists some of them in the afterword. And when I read that, I was like, okay, I'm going to go back. And there were scenes that I just often, I hadn't exactly skipped, I definitely hadn't

• 1:05:06Speaker 05

  skipped them, but I'd read them and not really thought about them because they're quite short. So he gives a list, he says, you know, it's almost like the list of clues that Hercule Poirot gives you in Whodunit. And he gives you a list of these things. The class list of Ramsdale School, Charlotte Hayes saying the word waterproof, the Casbean barber, Lolita playing tennis. And I, you know, did loads of, I fell down so many rabbit holes reading up on all these. So to give you one example, the Casbean barber, Nabokov said that this scene took him a month to write. And it's literally three sentences. "In Casbe, when old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut," and he goes on, "Humbert went to this barber, this barber cut his hair and babbled of a baseball-playing son of his.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  And then later," it says, "so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realise that the moustached young ballplayer had been dead for the last 30 years." So basically, all it is is an old barber talks to him about his son and Humbert only realises at the end that the son has been dead for 30 years. And critics have, I mean, there's an American philosopher called Richard Rorty, who wrote a whole essay about this short passage and said, you know, "This is such an important passage, one of the most important passages in modern fiction." And that actually what Nabokov is doing there is he's telling you that Humbert, Humbert, and effectively is a psychopath, that Humbert is so indifferent to the feelings of other people and to other people's experiences that he does not notice, he simply does

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  not notice that this old barber is telling you about his dead son, which is the most traumatic thing that ever happened to this barber. But it's all lost in Humbert's narration because Humbert doesn't even notice.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  It's kind of like a murder mystery. It's so hard to pin down the genre of this book. And you often feel like, like you alluded to earlier, you often feel like you're in this hall of mirrors and that's exactly how Humbert feels. Is it partly a symptom of his derangement, of his kind of mania or whatever it is? But anyway, when he and Lolita check into The Enchanted Hunters, which we've said, it comes up again and again and again, where he plans, and this is where he plans to rape Lolita for the first time, the room is full of mirrors. There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door, ditto, a blue dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet, mirror, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  So we don't know what's real and what's a reflection.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  And then the other thing is that that night, the night that he's building up to it, he's bought these sleeping pills, which add to the sense of the surreal, because they have there these purple pills and he imagines kind of Lolita drifting away on this cloud of dreaminess. And it's like he's warping reality for her, like a little girl taken into Wonderland while he has his wicked way with her, but they don't really work. So when it actually happens, it's sort of, it doesn't really happen on the page and it's quite sort of disappointing and very real, which, you know, it saps the illusion for the reader, which makes it much more kind of visceral, I suppose, to read. But it means that it's impossible to know what's real and what isn't, you know? Is this Humbert Humbert's deranged mind?

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  But it's also just the book itself. The whole book is full of doubles. Annabel Lee for Lolita.

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  Claire Quilty for Humbert himself. Then there are other doubles for Humbert. His friend Gaston Godin, who's a European exile and a professor of French that he bumps into in the town that they're living, he's also a paedophile, but he's interested in boys. And Godin has pictures on the wall of gay European cultural icons, so Tchaikovsky, Proust, as well as Harold D. Double Name, Harold D. Double Name, a misty-eyed, left-wing professor at a Midwestern university.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  Well, I think, you see, what he's doing is, I think Godin is like the, you know, the hall of mirrors thing. I think Godin is his reflection, but he's horrified by what he sees. Because he says of Godin, "There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum, repulsive, fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language. There he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young, oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody. And here was I." Now, "and here was I," at first glance, you think, well, there's Godin and there's me and we're two different people. But "and here was I," I think the implication is they're the same person, that actually

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  the person he's describing, Godin, a worthless scholar, an old invert, contemptuous of the American way of life, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young, he's describing himself. And he's describing like a really hideous version of himself, but that's almost like a bit of self-knowledge.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  Probably what he knows he will be as well.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  What he knows he will be. And then you already said, the most obvious double and the big puzzle at the centre of the book is this guy Claire Quilty. And I mean, I love rereading it and looking for all the Quilty references. So he first meets Quilty, we first meet Quilty. Humbert Humbert is leafing through a book, Who's Who in the Limelight. There are sort of biographies of different people, sort of theatrical people. Quilty, Claire, American dramatist, author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning, in collaboration with Vivian Dartbloom, as in Vladimir Nabokov.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  There we have lightning, we have the little nymph, we have Vivian Dartbloom.

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  Stark Age, The Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love and others. His many plays for children are notable. The Little Nymph travelled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. So they've got The Nymphs, Plays for Children, The Road Trip, all of that kind of stuff. And actually, the very next entry in the Who's Who, which Humbert Humbert gives, is for an actress called Dolores who disappeared.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And actually, it seems as though we first meet Quilty at The Enchanted Hunters. Remember, this is where Humbert drugs Lolita and is about to rape her, sort of a seminal turnpoint in the plot. And he's waiting for the sleeping pill to take effect. And then downstairs, he encounters a strange man sitting in the shadows. It's such a strange surreal scene, this, you barely know what's real and what is not. And you can hear, but not really see him, and that is obviously suggestive. And the stranger asks questions, which Humbert keeps mishearing. So, he says, "Where the devil did you get her?" "I beg your pardon. I said, 'The weather is getting better,' et cetera, et cetera."

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  So you think, oh, is Quilty playing with Humbert or is Humbert hearing?

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:11:44Speaker 04

  His conscience, in a way, shouting up at him. And it implies that the stranger knows what Humbert is doing. And then he lights a match, but it illuminates not him, but some other person, a very old man. And it's a really odd scene because we don't really know who the old man is, we don't really know what this guy in the shadows is saying. Does he even exist? Is Humbert talking to himself? Is the old man a reflection of Humbert? You know, in the way that the French professor is.

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  Is there other three people in that scene or just one? Like, you just, you just don't know at all. And I love that. And also, when they go on the road trip, Claire Quilty's name keeps coming up. So at one point, he's the author of the, the school play that Lita is gonna be in, which is called, of course, The Enchanted Hunters.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yes, and she plays a nymph in it, doesn't she?

• 1:12:33Speaker 05

  Yes, she does. She plays a nymph, and it's written by Vivian Dart Bloom and Claire Quilty. And actually, I mean, my take, I mean, obviously, as I said already, I don't believe any of these people actually exist or existed. But I think it's a huge, a wonderful literary riddle, a game.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  As in, you don't think that even in the world of Lolita, they existed? Do you, do you think Humbert is just a guy in a cell making this all up to feed a fevered imagination?

• 1:12:58Speaker 05

  Um, okay, we can get really deep into this. I mean, this is.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  I think you love, you love like a meta reading of a book.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do. I think, see, I don't think any of them exist. I think all we have is the text, and they're just textual creations.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  That's the historian you coming through. That's the evidence.

• 1:13:15Speaker 05

  And it's a massive textual game.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  See, I've, I would find it unsatisfactory to read it like that.

• 1:13:21Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  But you love the book.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  I love the book, and I love all the clues, and I love the puzzles and.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  But hold on, do you think, therefore, that there really is such a person in this world as Vivian Dart Bloom?

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  No, of course not, of course not. But I do think that there was, you know, in this world, Humbert Humbert is a deranged psychopath or whatever who's playing games around. And I think that he probably did take a young girl, Lolita, on a road trip, and that all of that happened. But the, the Claire Quilty thing, I'm not so sure about.

• 1:13:46Speaker 05

  Okay. Anyway, just to move on swiftly, more swiftly than Humbert Humbert does with Lolita. Takes egos on this massive road trip. So to talk of the road trip. The road trip, now, I do think this kind of existed because I think the road trip is brilliant.

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:14:00Speaker 05

  The road trip is so well done. And as somebody who's been on like, a couple of years ago, as you know.

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  Humbert enters the chat.

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  Ah, shut up, that's so poor. We went on this massive road trip, but can I stress, with my family.

• 1:14:16Speaker 05

  And through the sort of American Southwest, Colorado and whatnot, New Mexico and all that. It's incredible. But it is full of all these mad things that Humbert describes. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of bear creeks, soda springs, painted canyons, a collection of a local lady's homemade sculptures, closed on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland, fish hatcheries, cliff dwellings, a 20th Hell's Canyon, a 50th Gateway to something or other. And it is this sort of small-town American world where you're just in the middle of nowhere, and there's like Gobler's Gulch or whatever, that is a local beauty spot.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  I think Nabokov is very amused by it all.

• 1:14:53Speaker 05

  He's totally amused.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  The twee kind of like, come in here, folks.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  He's very, and some critics sort of say of him, oh, he's very, he's so obviously contemptuous. I don't think he is contemptuous.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  I don't think he is. I think he's amused.

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  I think he's amused. I think he has that European, that classic European experience of America where you're simultaneously horrified but intoxicated by it.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, like you have.

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  I mean, I would, I think, I want to just distance myself from the Humbert Humbert comparison.

• 1:15:21Speaker 04

  No, no, no, like Nabokov, Nabokov.

• 1:15:23Speaker 05

  Okay, I'll take the Nabokov comparison.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, you'd love to take the Nabokov.

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  I'll definitely take that. And also the motels, like Humbert relishes the names of the motels. All those sunset motels, U-Beam cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pineview Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, all of that. He loves regaling us with all the details and all the texture, the Americana.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's that scene when he goes and buys clothes for Lolita, basically, I don't know, to sort of blackmail her into being really happy that her mum's dead and that he's now gonna be taking her on the road and keeping her as a slave. And he sort of talks about all the fabrics and the different shapes and sizes and the food courts and how all the ladies are very impressed by his knowledge of female clothing and the frill colors. And Lolita is delighted by all these things.

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  And he's always buying her like chewing gum and roller skates and.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  Totally. But she loves pop culture. This starlet was going out with that starlet. That's what I mean about her being so much a teenager of this time. So I think you can't underestimate the extent to which this book is a European's experience of America. But it lurches increasingly out of control. You fall further and further down the rabbit hole into sort of a sick, dark wonderland, don't you? Meaning and order breaks down, reality breaks down, he loses his sanity, the passages get longer. It's quite trippy at times.

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  He becomes obsessed by the idea that they're being tailed by a detective, this guy called Gustav Trapp. And he is somehow a version of Humbert's Swiss uncle.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, so weird.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  But clearly he can't be. And then Lolita falls ill. She goes to hospital in Elphinstone, which is also a fantastical allusion. Some critics think that she actually dies here and that everything that follows is just a mad hallucination, and none of it actually happened. I bet you love that theory.

• 1:17:11Speaker 05

  Uh, I do like that theory, but of course, I don't believe any of it really happened.

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, true. But I think then that that dulls the impact of our final meeting with Lolita later. So assuming she doesn't die, she's checked out by one uncle, Mr. Gustav.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  He searches for her. He searches in 342 different hotels, motels and tourist homes. And he claims every time he goes in, he wants to check the visitor's book. And he claims that this guy who's kidnapped her is always one step ahead of him, checking in under various aliases. So Grattiano Forbeson, Arthur Rainbow, Phineas Quimby, and so on. And actually, I, I spent like far too long online reading a, a thing online called the Nabokovian, which explains all these names and what they mean and like all the references. It's like the names are puzzles for us. And actually, at one point Humbert says to us, basically, he almost asks the reader for help, you know, says, I couldn't work out.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  That's the agodic thing again. Agodic literature always does that. It almost asks you to solve its puzzles.

• 1:18:10Speaker 05

  Right. Who was Johnny Randall, Ramble, Ohio? Or was he a real person who just happened to write a hand similar to N. S. Aristoph Catagili in New York? You know, and Nabokov sets us the riddles, and Humbert Humbert is asking us to help with him. But Humbert Humbert goes on to say, having read all these riddles and all these names, I realized that the kidnapper had affinities with me. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was an amateur of sex law. I mean, again, clearly the kidnapper is Humbert, is Humbert himself. Because, you know, that, this is a mirror image of himself.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  So anyway, he gets a letter, doesn't he, eventually from Lolita, who now, her name has changed again?

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Yes. She's Mrs. Richard F. Schiller of Colmont. That's her new name. And I've actually always been quite affected by this scene because she is so different from the kind of bolshy, flirtatious, slightly hurt teen that we've come to know through Humbert. You know, she's clearly a woman. She looks tired. She's smoking. She's pregnant. And it's kind of tragic. And also, remember, we learnt earlier her fate.

• 1:19:23Speaker 05

  We did, in the, in the foreword, in the first few paragraphs of the book.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  In the foreword, that she dies giving birth to a stillborn child, a stillborn daughter. I find it a very grim and depressing scene. But anyway, it sets in motion the final showdown between this quilty and Humbert himself.

• 1:19:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and Quilty lives in yet more of these little in-jokes. He lives in Pavor Manor on Grim Road. Pavor is Latin for fear. Grim, the brothers' grim, the fairy tale.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Fairy tales again. And the book is full of allusions to fairy tales. Enchanted Hunters, you know, Annabelle Lee, his descriptions of the nymphettes.

• 1:20:03Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. So, and this is a mad scene. I mean, such a psychedelic scene. The showdown with Quilty. Quilty and Humbert at times seem to be the same person. Quilty speaks in Humbert's voice back to him, knowing, wry, funny, sort of highbrow and whatnot. They end up fighting for, Humbert's brought a gun.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  It's a really weird scene. It's like somewhere between an action thriller and like a camp comedy.

• 1:20:27Speaker 05

  It is, exactly.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  You can't work out what's going on.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  But again, their identities are melding. So I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. Like, they're the same.

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  Quilty's like the American Humbert because Humbert's European-ness starts to come across as aged and undignified.

• 1:20:47Speaker 05

  Oh, right, that's.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  In comparison to Quilty's kind of wry Americanisms. You know, it's like laconic American sort of vibe and way of speaking.

• 1:20:57Speaker 05

  There's yet more sort of literary stuff. So Humbert has brought along a poem, which is Quilty's death sentence.

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  Again, this is what I mean. So undignified somehow.

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  Humbert reads this poem or makes Quilty read it, and it's a parody of T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  And Quilty's kind of going in the background, you know, that's not half-bad. That's not half-bad.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  It's so weird. Then there's this mad hallucinatory scene where they're running around the house and he's shooting Quilty again and again, but Quilty doesn't die. Until basically, does Quilty fall into the bed and he shoots him or something like that?

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yes, and yeah, but he says, you know, Quilty's missing an eye, he's missing a chin, but he's still running around the house.

• 1:21:34Speaker 05

  And then he shot Quilty. He comes downstairs and he finds the unexpected him. This is so dreamlike.

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  It's quite American Psycho, actually.

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  The house is full of people who are drinking Quilty's booze. And he says, oh, I've just shot Quilty. And they're like, oh, really, have you? And then he goes out and he finds that his car has been boxed in by two of the cars in the car park. And I had some trouble squeezing out, he says. And it's such a madly banal way to end this scene.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  It's, it's the comical juxtaposition of the incredibly banal and incredibly kind of Gothic horror.

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Surrealism of it all.

• 1:22:11Speaker 05

  But the very final scene of the book. So interesting.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  It's oddly tender, isn't it?

• 1:22:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. On the very last page or so, he describes hearing children playing in the distance. And it seems to be the only time, one of the only times he fears real remorse. He says, what I heard was but the melody of children at play. And then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. Meaning she's not playing with the other children because she's no longer a child. He's stolen her childhood. And you might say, well, this is Humbert Humbert's one moment of self-knowledge. Or you might say, this is just another trick. He's telling us what we want to hear. I mean, Nabokov has already parodied the moral message in the John Ray Junior introduction.

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  So we can't know whether is Humbert being sincere? Or is this yet another of his sort of little games? And then it ends with him saying, I began writing this book 56 days ago, first in the psychopathic ward and then in this well-heated, albeit tumble seclusion. And that could be like, it could be a padded cell or it could literally be a tomb. He might be dead.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Is it death row? That's kind of what I thought.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess it could be because he says, I want this book to be published when Lolita is no longer alive. Thus neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. And again, I was like, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. Is this another Nabokov joke? Because of course, as I said before, I don't think either of them are real. And is Nabokov having a joke with us there? Of course they're not alive because they never existed because this is all a literary, a literary game.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  I think that's kind of the final shadow, very few shadows we get of his sort of vague remorse, maybe.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  He's absolutely fine to retell this all and to laugh at it and to have his fun with it. If he is no longer alive, he can kind of make it into an almost satirical, farcical Gothic horror of an account of a man who loved a woman, an underage woman, an underage girl. Sorry.

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  But there are critics, aren't there, who say, I mean, we've spoken a lot about the literary games and the riddles and stuff, and we haven't even come close to sort of exploring them all.

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we should definitely talk about what it's, you know, what's the experience as a reader in dealing with the moral horror of Humbert's crimes? You know, he's a paedophile and a rapist. So by laughing at him, by being delighted by the book and enthralled by it, and by enjoying his riddles and his kind of intellectual turn of phrase. Are we complicit in his crimes? So the critic Lionel Trilling says, over the course of the novel, we are seduced into conniving in the violation.

• 1:24:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Do you think we are? Do you think we're seduced into conniving in it?

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  I don't think we're being seduced at all. I don't think that's really what's happening. I think that we go along with Humbert, I think that's for sure. But I don't think we're meant to feel bad about ourselves or we're meant to really think this is all happening and that, you know, we ought to be passing judgment. And I also think that there are moments when Nabokov is reminding us of the horror of this, just in a really subtle, brilliant way. For instance, there's that scene where Lolita, as I said, Humbert watches her looking on at a family with genuine kind of pain and longing in her eyes. And then when they have sex at the Enchanted Hunters, Humbert describes her taking the lead and then how she tricks him and shows him what she learnt at summer camp and how, you know, she was already kind of impure.

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  But then also there's a scene later, just after that, when she collapses in floods of tears in his arms. Kind of the reality of what's happening to her and the fact that she's lost her mother.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, but he imagines, he has this weird daydream where he imagines the hotel asking him to paint a mural to mark the moment. And he imagines there would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of colour, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child. And those last words, a wincing child? Suddenly that's really jarring after the sort of, you know, very beautifully written prose that has preceded it. And there are a couple more examples at the end of part one, when he tells Lolita that her mother is dead. He says, at the hotel, we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night, she came sobbing into mine and we made it up very gently.

• 1:26:33Speaker 05

  And then this very cold line, you see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  Cold, but quite smug.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, smug, I agree. I mean, you could say that behind all the riddles and the puzzles, that this is the secret behind the story.

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 05

  That there's actually, if you believe that these characters exist or you contemplate the sort of reality of the situation, as it were. What that means is a 12-year-old girl who's crying and is frightened and.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  In a nightdress, yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 05

  Exactly. And that actually, that is obscured for us behind all Humbert's games, but it's there nevertheless.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  But also when he talks about how Lolita increasingly becomes a sort of aloof and watchful. You know, I think that's also in itself telling. She has to grow hard and.

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. All right. I think, I mean, this was such a, we said before we started recording, we'll never stop talking about this book because there's so much to discuss. And we have gone on far too long.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  This is actually only part one.

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  And I think we should score this, are we going to suggest we score it in Enchanted Hunters? Since the.

• 1:27:35Speaker 04

  Very tasteful. Good.

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  Thank you. So should I go first or do you want to go first?

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  I think you should go first.

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm going to give it an unquestionable 10 out of 10. It is a very unsettling subject, but of course that's part of the point and part of the effect. Personally, I could read this book again and again. I don't think I'd ever get bored. I think it's one of the most brilliant books ever written. I think it's an amazing crossword puzzle. It's a beautifully judged work of art. It is so complicated. It is so complex intellectually, but also morally. Even during recording this podcast, I've kind of changed my mind about it about four times. I think sentence by sentence, it's so beautifully written, but it demands a lot of you as a reader. But it gives you so much in return. It opens up so many sort of fascinating lines of inquiry. I think it's a complete masterpiece.

• 1:28:22Speaker 04

  I agree. I always like it when a book asks a lot of its reader, and I think this does. But I think it's, you know, it's a very hackneyed turn of phrase. It is just a masterpiece. I think, I think Vladimir Nabokov could almost do anything with literature. And I think this book had a special place in his heart because he was achieving, trying to do so much in writing on the darkest subject matter that possibly could be. And finding a way to make it slightly satirical, slightly humorous, but conveying it all with the most beautiful writing I have ever read. And in such a way that it's a great read as well, you know, and Humbert Humbert is just matchless.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  His narrative voice is matchless, you know, knowing the book is appalled and appalls you, but it manages to laugh at you while it does it all the while. It's just, yeah, it's just, it is a masterpiece. So yeah, I'm going to give it 10 out of 10 as well.

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  Okay. So Tabby, what do we have coming next on the show?

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  Keeping it light and light, we are going from this to Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Then we have A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr.

• 1:29:28Speaker 05

  Beautiful book.

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  Then we have American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. And I've actually been reading that alongside Lolita. And that's been a very interesting kind of comparison. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, White Nights by Theodore Dostoevsky, The Shining by Stephen King.

• 1:29:45Speaker 05

  And of course, if you want to have your say about the, what you made of the book, or you want to disagree with me and Tabby, then sign up for our book club notes, which will arrive every Saturday, completely free. And you can do it at thebookclubhq.com. And you can, of course, also suggest books for us to do on the show because a lot of those books are, you know, it's Kill a Mockingbird or White Nights or Jane Eyre or whatever. They are suggestions from listeners, so keep those coming in, please. All right, brilliant. Thank you, Tabby. Lolita, what an amazing book, Tabby. On that bombshell, bye bye.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:30:22Speaker 05

  9/11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. But could it have been prevented? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst. We're the hosts of The Rest Is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the inside story of how the 9/11 terrorists slipped through the CIA's grasp. In the summer of 2000, a man walks up to US immigration at Newark Airport. His passport gets stamped, he's waved through and welcome to America. That single stamp was one of the gravest intelligence blunders in modern history. Because one year later, nearly 3,000 people will be dead. That man was Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11.

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