Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Profile Books UK
Published: 2011-10-27T07:00:00+00:00

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Following a series of happy accidents, including her seducing him in a motor hotel, he takes off with his little nymphet on an odyssey across the highways of America. It all ends tragically after Lolita dumps Humbert for Clare Quilty, a pornographer of genius. Everyone dies, including Lolita, ‘in childbed [sic] giving birth to a stillborn girl’.

The book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie (of which Nabokov approved) enriched him and from 1959 he lived in Switzerland in a four-star hotel – a comfortable nowhere. He continued Lolita’s explorations with language in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, becoming increasingly self-important and given to such haughty utterances as: ‘I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning.’

From 1974 until his death, from mysterious viral infections, Nabokov worked on a final novel, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). The novel was never completed and he instructed the manuscript be destroyed. He was not one to leave working materials lying about: ‘Rough drafts, false scents, half-explored trails, dead ends of inspiration,’ he once wrote, ‘are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius.’ The lordly crack about mediocrities (a category which includes, for Nabokov, many of the reading public, most living authors, and all professors of literature) is hackle-raising, but no genius was more concerned with ‘finish’. And if not finished one way the book must be finished the other – destroyed. Nabokov’s wife and son, defying (like Max Brod and Kafka) his instruction, preserved and in 2009 published The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). The scrappy, bewildering, narrative ends with a thesaurus of finalities:

efface

expunge

erase

delete

rub out

wipe out

obliterate

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