Original subtitles

The narrator is a deranged psychopath.

He's a murderer. He's a liar.

Here's the thing. For a reader, I think Lolita is one of the most exhilarating

experiences you can have. Lolita was hugely controversial.

It was effectively banned in Britain and France.

The main character is one of the best-known unreliable narrators. Is he a

monster? Is he a madman? Can we trust a word that he says?

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

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. It is ironic and knowing and

playful and exquisitely written, in my view. Every page, every paragraph is

full of tricks and puzzles and illusions.

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, the 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.

Humbert Humbert, our narrator, for all his brilliance and for all his wordplay,

for all his kind of clever, knowing illusions, 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 a 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.

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.

Motels feature prominently in this story.

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

Yeah, I think if you like motels before, you're not going to after reading

Lolita. Yeah, that's true.

This episode is brought to you by Klarna. Tabby, as I was saying to you

the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go

into these great reveries when I come up with my best ideas.

I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin.

It's the same for you, isn't it? You know, I used to spend a lot of time

rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always

hoped for. But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started

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admin. And that gives me the headspace for the more important things like

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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 managed 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 archenemy.

And Humber 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.

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 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, 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.

And yet, as I just alluded to, Dominic, there is something particularly

unsettling in his voice, in how charming he is. 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'm 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

f***ed. funny. 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.

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. 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 colourful, so rich and unexpected.

It's a book set in 1950s America. It's all about motels and it's all about

1950s consumerism. But its 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 traced their lineage back to the 14th century, to the Tatars,

kind of medieval Russia, medieval Muscovy.

His grandfather was Tsar Alexander II's Minister of Justice.

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 married

the heiress to a gold mine.

And he was their favorite.

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 is all about

the last days of the Tsars and his memory of his childhood and stuff. It's

wonderful. I'd love to read that because I've always been fascinated by that kind

of, it was a time outside of time, those gilded lives, you know? That's exactly

it. There are some critics who've 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. The Wendy's and

diners of 1950s America versus kind of the Fabergé eggs and the ice rinks and

the mufflers of St. Petersburg.

God. 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 he met some incredible people when he was young. There's something quite

Lampedusa 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 ten, 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 you frothing at the mouth with

excitement over this, H.G. Wells came to dinner in their St. Petersburg mansion.

That's brilliant.

What a literary, intellectual upbringing.

And then he's in some motel in Colorado.

Yeah, I know.

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

Mostly romantic poems, yeah. Modelled 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.

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

to Nabokov.

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

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

I knew you would.

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

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

Well, does it? That's the question. This is like my calling card. This is how I

was led on first dates. So like, what do you associate with the word interesting?

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

Yellow.

Yellow. Yeah. Tabitha is a yellow name. Tabitha is a very yellow word. Yeah.

What about Dominic? 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.

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.

It helped her to understand.

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

maybe. Maybe. Maybe. 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, the Nabokovs have to flee St.

Petersburg, as did so many of those families, you know, later sort of

whites, I guess I would, you know, parts of the white army.

So they ended up in the Crimea.

Nabokov Sr. became part of the kind of white administration there. The white

armies crumble.

You know, Nabokov Sr. decides, right, we've got to go. We've got to get out.

And they go to England.

And obviously for Vladimir, young Vladimir, this is unbelievably

traumatic. 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...

The classic thing about jewels sewn into your fur coat or something. Yeah, it's

oddly, tragically comedic in some ways, I think. I suppose there is something

slightly forlorn about the Russian exiles. Yeah, that come to London.

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 in 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, 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

Milyukov.

During the lecture, Milyukov was attacked by ultra-monarchists, 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 Sr.

tried to stop them and was shot through the heart and killed.

That's Vladimir's father. What a way to lose your father after the drama of

losing your homeland and everything, and then that. 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.

It's a kind of obsession for him, and you can absolutely understand why.

But what this means 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 Lampedusa, 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 Slonim from a

Jewish family. It 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 typist.

They have one son, Dmitry, and he became a very prominent translator,

interestingly.

But at this time, he's writing under the pen name of Vladimir Sirin. Now, the

Sirin It's 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 Dimitri.

And then, of course, the Nazis come to power. And at first, Nabokov is totally

oblivious. 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 is a Russian

Jew. She is in danger.

So in 1937, they move 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 1940, Paris is about to fall to the Germans. They move again,

and this time they go to America.

And it's just as well that they did because his brother, Sergei, 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.

And he seems to be, you know, the Nabokovs seem to be battered in the

winds of all of it. 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.

See, I think that's great.

But I think it's something quite creepy about the way butterfly lovers pin their

butterflies. Yeah, of course. And it's a really weird thing. So I was reading up

on this.

Nabokov's absolute specialism.

was the male genitalia of butterflies.

So he makes these expeditions with Vera all over America and continues to do so.

In the summer, he would go to Colorado or New Mexico or something. And that

finds its way into Lolita, these trips.

He bases some of Lolita on these butterfly collecting trips.

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 1940s and 50s, 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 says of Lolita, In 1956, he says, for me, a work of fiction

exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic

bliss. So like Oscar Wilde and his aesthetics.

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 Knight in 1941, and then Ben Sinister in

1947.

He translates.

Personally, most of his other 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. 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 phases to his career, the Russian and the

English, but there's a definite continuity between them.

So shifting identities, people playing chess, doubling.

Dodgy émigrés.

Yeah, émigrés, colours.

all the old synesthesia 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 humor. 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.

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 1916.

And it tells the story of a middle-aged narrator who stays in this house as a

lodger, becomes obsessed with a preteen girl.

called Lolita, who lives in the house.

And then some critics suggest that Nabokov read this in Berlin and was kind

of either 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 Ruka

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 and he took him outside.

He asked his uncle to come outside.

But nevertheless, it carried on until Nabokov was a teenager.

And then one day, when he was a bit older, and 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 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 11-year-old girl kidnapped in 1948 by a

guy called Frank LaSalle, who was a 51-year-old mechanic and sex offender

who pretended to be a member of the FBI to make her do what he wanted for years.

And it's a horrendous story. He traveled across America with her for 21 months,

claiming to be her father under various aliases. And then even once he was

imprisoned, he still claimed that he was her father.

Very, very dark. 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.

But the parallels are striking.

The fact that Humbert asks, had I done to Dolly perhaps what Frank LaSalle, a

50-year-old mechanic, had done to 11-year-old Sally Horner?

I mean, surely that's a bit of a giveaway.

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

But then Nabokov's own explanation.

So he wrote this afterward in 1956, and he says...

Really interestingly, he said, I got the idea just before the Second World War,

39 or 40.

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 charcoaled by an animal. This sketch showed bars of the poor

creature's cage.

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

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.

I actually thought Lolita.

Okay. Well, there you go. Interesting.

But he does make play throughout the book with this period's infatuation and

fascination with psychoanalysis and all these experiments going into 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. 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 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 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 1986, his son Dimitri actually published it.

So anyway, he'd obviously written this first version.

And then he couldn't leave it alone. He couldn't give up on the theme.

So in 1947, 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.

And we'll come back to The Kingdom by the Sea because it has a... important

meaning. It 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, he needs to create an American world for his book as he

created a French one or an English one or whatever, 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 preteen kids or the teenagers.

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

course. Because you don't understand this world at all. How else are you

going to know? And to be fair, Dolores Lolita does sound very authentic.

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

characterization. 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.

Quite Humbert behavior.

That's very Humbert behavior. And actually, one of my favorite bits of the

book is when Humbert goes to meet the headmistress, Miss Pratt, in the second

half of the book.

He bought the Girl Scout manual. He bought gun catalogs and he studied them

closely 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.

It definitely pays off.

Anyway, he finishes the book in December 1953.

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 i think some of them did actually supposedly some of them did

and they said it's so amazing book it's a shame but you know it's a shame you've

written about a pedophile because basically we can't publish it 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 Humber is

based on Nabokov and that the book is pro-pedophilia.

Yeah, I mean, terrible.

A bit unnerving. And anyway, so it's published in September 1955 under

Nabokov's name in Olympia's Traveller's Companion.

This is a bit like in the Wind of the Willows, people saying, well, this just

isn't good biology.

Animals wouldn't brush their teeth or whatever.

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 are no reviews and it gets very little attention. Then at the

end of 1955, old beloved friend of the show, Graham Greene, 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.

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 called G.P.

Putnam's Sons. He came round and she said, look at this. This is brilliant. I

think you should publish this.

The girl had an eye.

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. Through Lolita. Through Lolita. And then if you want a really

mad story, they went out for dinner with the Nabokovs and his wife said to Vera

Nabokov. What, the mistress?

No, the wife.

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 husband is carrying on with this

showgirl because another of his mistresses, a gossip columnist, wrote

about it.

Mad. No way.

We should be doing a podcast about this guy. Now, here's the twist.

Sounds fantastic.

Dmitry 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 Dmitry Nabokov has taken her back to his apartment and they've

spent like the evening together.

She's having her revenge.

She's having her revenge with Nabokov's son. I admire that immensely.

What a mad story that is. She's punishing both her husband and Lolita.

Excellent. I mean, crazy story. Anyway, as a result of 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. This makes me think

that, like you, he doesn't read all the books that he reviews or something

because it is so...

Tabby, that is so untrue. That is untrue.

Because it is so not dull.

No, I know.

Nor is it florid. It's perfectly balanced.

You like Kingsley, miss. And I like Kingsley, miss. 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 of the Times 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.

If you read it as someone wryly kind of cocking an eyebrow at you throughout and

sort of watching you to see how much you shiver, you know, how much you squeal.

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

only just understanding.

I think that's true. Yeah. And then 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. So I've never seen that. 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.

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.

Yeah, he said it left him with the most pleasurable afterglow because it's the

purest, the most abstract and carefully contrived. And actually, this issue of

how carefully contrived it is.

goes to the heart of its appeal, I think. The fact that 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 are horrified by the subject matter.

The abiding thing, I think, is the style because it's the style that defines it,

isn't it?

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 his 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 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, 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.

Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, French writers like Flaubert.

Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire. There's lots of classical allusions as a way to kind

of justify his fetish and root it in something that was deemed permissible in

a different time. But he also knows that he's kind of making play with that. Of

course, yeah.

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.

And every sentence, I mean, there are multiple meanings.

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. Yeah, top literary journal.

Exactly. And he said Lolita was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle. It's

composition and it's solution at the same time since one is a mirror view of

the other depending on the way you look. And that theme of mirrors, the idea of

doubling and the idea of things reflecting each other and being in a

hall of mirrors is really important.

Your first voice you hear is not Humbert Humbert's voice. Yeah, this is so

strange. The book has a fake foreword by a man who calls himself John Ray Jr.

So Ray says that the author of this memoir, Humbert Humbert, died in

legal... captivity of coronary thrombosis on November 16th, 1952. It's

so pompous. What is going on there? Yeah. Yeah, it's so pompous. But

obviously, he's telling us that Humbert died, that he was in a mental asylum.

Effectively, exactly. He was in a mental asylum and awaiting trial.

And then there are clues throughout the...

in the rest of the foreword, aren't they? Because Ray tells us what happened

to some of the characters.

Yeah. So for instance, there's actually a clue to Lolita's fate in there when it

says, Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbed giving birth to a stillborn

girl on Christmas Day, 1952 in Grey Star, 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 cue to be

published shortly in Critics Who Have... Peruse the manuscript, call it her best

book. So who is Vivian Darkbloom? Yeah, so Vivian Darkbloom, another character.

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 is this book that this person who's got Vladimir Nabokov's name has written?

Is it like another version of Leta that's about Claire Quilty?

Because there's a lot in common between Claire Quilty.

and Humbert, are they arguably foils? Are they arguably the same person?

Exactly. And the whole foreword ends with John Ray Jr.

saying, 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.

So cynical. So cynical and sarcastic because Nabokov hates this kind of

thing. He is mocking it. He hates moral writing. So, of course.

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. 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 molesterer? 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 of it not even happen?

Can we trust a word that he says? 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. They're actually brilliant. They

land in your inbox. They genuinely are. 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, you were claiming that you think Lolita's 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

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Let me know why you agree with me. 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. And it is damn good. So I

would truly...

recommend it. 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? You love an unreliable narrator, don't you? I do

love an unreliable narrator, Tabby. It's one of my quirks, one of my

eccentricities. You're so kooky like that.

It makes you really interesting.

Yeah, you've got to have something.

So Humber 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.

Yes, exactly.

It'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. But it's never just twofold or threefold or whatever. It's

like just that reference alone.

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 beautiful and endearing. But then

you could also say, oh, well, Humbert is kind of hoodwinking us because that's

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 when actually he wasn't I was raping her

yeah 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.

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.

Right, exactly.

He's always mocking something. He is. I mean, he's even mocking his mother's

death, right? A couple of hours later, my very photogenic mother died in a

freak accident.

Rackets. 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.

But then actually the way it's written is actually exquisite. The hollows and

dells and memory and all that stuff. 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 short.

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 Durda 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.

It's a teenage girl called Annabelle Lee that he met on the French Riviera. 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. Yeah. Because as I've said before, a country's

popular... thought, Lolita is not a pornographic or sensual, salacious book

in any way at all. But her name, Annabel Lee, it comes from Edgar Allan Poe's

last complete poem, Annabel Lee, which I loved as a child, actually, where the

narrator is describing his love for a girl called Annabel 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 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.

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 Annabel 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 this sick fetish with...

illusions to doomed love like Romeo and Juliet or something all over again.

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.

So when I started this book, and this is basically the first chapter of this

section, the first, once you get through the initial bit written by someone else,

he's basically trying to explain and justify in a slightly mocking tone, his,

you know, paedophilia, essentially.

At times he almost blames.

the nymphettes themselves, because nymphs are quite flittish in Greek

mythology and they're always 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 Lilith 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

exactly he implies throughout doesn't he that Leta is she's flirtatious she's

flirtatious and she is actually I mean later as we will see he claims that

she's actually initiated their first real sexual encounter yeah and like he

says that he's driven crazy by their mixture of tender, dreamy childishness

and wry vulgarity. So he does that.

Very, very well. 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.

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

funny. 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 tittle cup.

Here are some more pictures.

So anyway, he marries a woman called Valeria.

He likes her because she gave...

She 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.

Taksovich, but then he finds out that his name is actually Mr.

Maksimovich. And he thinks about murdering Mr.

Maksimovich, doesn't he? But he doesn't do it. Yeah, he's also ridiculously

outraged at the fact that said wife has been unfaithful on him with said

Maksimovich, 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 to him,

he's just...

furious yeah he can't believe it because he always also makes allusions to the

fact that he thinks older women find him very attractive he does yeah he often

says what a massive catch he is for older women yeah 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 uh little town uh which is his synesthesia

i think tabby

Totally medically verified disorder.

Yeah, of course, 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.

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 nymphettes, all adult women come

across as vile, contrived, plucked, swollen, makeuped. And then the

nymphs, the nymphettes 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 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 the poor lady was in her middle 30s 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 i can't believe you

said before the recording that i was charlotte hayes unbelievable 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. You're one to talk.

Unbelievable.

She was, and this is so you, she was obviously one of those women whose

polished words may reflect a book club.

Again, again, pot, kettle, black.

Or any other deadly conventionality.

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

Women who are completely devoid of... Do you want to partake? Do you want to come

and join the society?

No, I fucking don't.

Tabby, women who are completely devoid of humour.

Yeah, well, that's fair. 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. Oh, see, it's quite twisted.

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 a nymphet's scent that in despair I tried to pick up as I bayed

through the undergrowth of dark, decaying forests.

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 your dark sense of humour.

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. I am. That is

what gets me every time, I have to say.

Which I have to say, I mean, it must be the most ungallant thing a man could

ever conceivably say about a woman.

Anyway. The massive thigh.

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

horrible to women generally.

Yes. He fantasizes about drowning her just as he fantasizes 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 thing about maybe being complicit,

he totally takes us with him. 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... 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, 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.

The mad thing is that he takes, 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.

The whole time, yeah.

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 the sanatorium and he used to trick the psychiatrists. I would

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. Yeah.

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. 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 playing into this period of the rise

of psychoanalysis or all that, whatever it may be.

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

exactly. There are moments though when 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 that's when they're traveling around together

and he is he is outside his window his window looks onto a playground where he

can watch other little oh yes i remember yeah when stuff like that you suddenly

go oh yeah he is actually very creepy yes i would say on the whole he does

take you with him and that's the thing is 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

It's slightly obscure.

Sorry, whereabouts in Europe is he from? Where is he an émigré from?

Did his father really own a hotel? Stuff like that.

So Humbert is never fixed. He seems out of place as an émigré wherever he is.

People can't pin him down.

He always has this dark brooding.

effect 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 Alita, he can't decide what name to give. What should I put?

Humberton daughter.

Humberton small daughter.

Homburg an immature girl.

Homburg and child.

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

in Slack. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in

my arms, she was always Alita.

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? 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.

Annabelle Lee, yeah.

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 glass.

I mean, that last bit is super creepy. Super creepy.

But the paragraph, the two paragraphs are beautifully written. 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?

So critics disagree.

Many don't think so. They see her as the manipulator behind the 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.

Wow, that's punchy. 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 fine. too harsh, but I don't think it's entirely the case

either that Lolita is 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. We'll come to this later, won't we? Because the

thing is about Lolita, of course, she's 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 step daughter 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 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.

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 those girls that get sucked into

cults at young ages.

Too young to kind of get it or understand it first and then is totally

powerless. 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.

Yeah, of course.

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. Yeah. 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 Humber Humber and Lolita are real when the book is so knowing

about its own.

status as a kind of literary artifact.

Definitely. But there are just moments where she's so realistically a teenage

American girl.

But then I suppose Humbert has made a study of them, just as Nabokov had made

a study of America.

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.

Yeah. The thing that's always strange, and I think we'll come to that, is that

we meet her in later life.

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 artefact, 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 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 a whodunit. And he gives you a list of these things.

The class list of Ramsdale School, Charlotte Hayes saying the word

waterproof, the Caspian Barber, Lolita playing tennis.

And I...

I fell down so many rabbit holes reading up on all these. So to give you one

example, the Caspian barber.

Nabokov said that this scene took him a month to write. And it's literally three

sentences.

In Caspian, an 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.

And then...

And later, it says, so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize 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 Humber

only realizes 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 actually what Nabokov is doing there.

She'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 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.

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. So we don't know

what's real and what's a reflection.

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 these purple pills and he imagines kind of, you know, 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 doesn't really happen on the page and it's quite

sort of disappointing and very real, which 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 Humber Humber's deranged

mind? But it's also just the book itself. The whole book is full of

doubles. Annabel Lee for Lolita.

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. Yeah. A misty-eyed left-wing professor

at a Midwestern university.

Well, I think, you see, what he's doing is, I think Godin is like 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 the person he's describing

in 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. Probably what he knows

he will be as well. 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.

Humber Humber 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 Darkbloom, as in Vladimir Nabokov.

There we have lightning, we have The Little Nymph, we have Vivian Darkbloom.

Dark 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 there you'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.

Yeah. And actually, it seems as though we first meet Quilty at the Enchanted

Hunters. Remember, this is where H8, you know, Humbert Humbert.

drugs Lolita and is about to rape her. Sort of a seminal turn point 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. 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. So you think, oh,

is Quilty playing with Humbert or is Humbert hearing?

Yes, exactly.

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 in the way that the French professor is?

Are there three people in that scene or just one?

You just don't know at all, and I love that.

Also, when they go on the road trip, Claire Quilt's name keeps coming up. So

at one point, he's the author of the school play that Lita...

is going to be in, which is called, of course, The Enchanted Hunters.

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

Yes, she does. She plays a nymph and it's written by Vivian Darkbloom 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.

As in you don't think that even in the world of Lolita they existed. Do you

think Humbert is just a guy in a cell making this all up? to feed a fevered

imagination. Okay, we can get really deep into this. I think you love like a

meta reading of a book.

Yeah, I do.

See, I don't think any of them exist.

I think all we have is the text and they're just textual creations.

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

And it's a massive textual game.

See, I would find it unsatisfactory to read it like that. Really?

Yeah. But you love the book. I love the book. And I love all the clues and I

love the puzzles. But hold on. Do you think, therefore, that there really is

such a person in this world as Vivian Darkbloom? 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. And I think that he

probably did take a young girl, Lolita, on a road trip and that all of that

happened. But the Claire Quilty thing, I'm not so sure about. Okay. Anyway,

just to move on swiftly, more swiftly than Humbert Humbert does with Lolita.

He goes 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. That's what I'm saying. The road trip is so well done. And as

somebody who's been on like a couple of years ago, as you know.

Humber enters the chat.

Oh, shut up, Tappy. That's so poor.

We went on this massive road trip that, can I stress, with my family 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, our 20th Hell's Canyon, our 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 Gobbler's Gulch or whatever. There's a

local beauty spot.

I think Nabokov is very amused by it all. He's totally amused. The twee kind

of like, come in here, folks.

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

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. Yeah, like you have.

I mean, I would...

I think I want to just distance myself from the Humber Humber comparison. No,

no, no, like Nabokov, Nabokov. Okay, I'll take the Nabokov comparison. Yeah,

you'd love to take the Nabokov. I'll definitely take that. And also the

motels, like Humber relishes the names of the motels. Yeah, he does. All those

sunset motels, U-beam cottages, Hillcrest courts, Pineview courts,

Mountainview courts, Skyline courts, all of that. He loves regaling us with all

the details and all the texture, the Americana. 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 mom's dead and that he's now

going to 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 frilled colors.

And Lolita is delighted.

by all these things.

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

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. Yeah, so weird. But clearly he can't be.

And then Lolita falls ill. She goes to hospital in Elphinstone, which is

also... fantastical illusion.

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.

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

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. He searches for her. He says 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 Gratiano, Forbeson, Arthur Rainbow,

Phineas, Quimby and so on.

And actually, I spent like far too long online reading 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. That's

the ergodic thing again. Ergodic literature always does that. It almost

asks you to solve its puzzles.

Right. Who was Johnny Randall, Ramble, Ohio?

Or was he a real person who just happened to write a hand similar to N.S.

Aristoff, Catergill in New York? You know, and Nabokov sets us the riddles

and Humbert Humbert is asking us to help.

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 illusions 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

this is a mirror image of himself.

So anyway, he gets a letter, doesn't he?

eventually from Lolita, who now her name has changed again.

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 bolshie 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 learned earlier her fate.

We did in the foreword, in the first few paragraphs of the book. 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 yeah and quilty lives in um yet more of these little in jokes he

lives in pavor manor on grim road pavor is latin for fear grim the brother's

grim The fairy tale.

Fairy tales again. And the book is full of allusions to fairy tales.

Enchanted hunters, you know, Annabelle Lee, his descriptions of the nymphettes.

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 it. Humber has brought a gun. It's a really weird

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

It is. Exactly. You can't work out what's going on. 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.

They're the same. Quilty's like the American Humbert because Humbert's

European-ness starts to come across as aged and undignified in comparison to

Quilty's kind of wry Americanisms.

You know, it's like laconic American sort of vibe and way of speaking.

There's yet more sort of literary stuff. So Humbert has brought along a poem.

which is Quilty's death sentence.

Again, this is what I mean.

So undignified somehow.

Cumberbatch reads this poem or makes Quilty read it. And it's a parody of T

.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday.

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

bad. That's not half bad.

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? Yes. And yeah, but he says, you know, Quilty's

missing an arm. He's missing a chin. He's still running around the house.

And then he's shot Quilty. He comes downstairs and he finds that

unexpectedly, I mean, this is so dreamlike.

It's quite American Psycho, actually. 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 other

cars in the car park.

And I had some trouble squeezing out.

And it's such a madly banal way to end this scene. It's the comical

juxtaposition of the incredibly banal and the incredibly kind of gothic

horror, surrealism of it all. But the very final scene of the book, so

interesting. It's oddly tender, isn't it? Yeah. And 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 Humber Humber'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 Jr.

introduction. So we can't know whether it's Humbert being sincere or is this

yet another of his 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.

Is it death row?

That's kind of what I thought.

Yeah, I guess it could be because she says, I want this book to be published

when Leta 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 game.

I think that's kind of the final shadow.

Very few shadows we get of his sort of vague remorse, maybe.

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.

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. 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 Humber'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.

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

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 Humber. 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 where 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 learned at summer

camp and how she was already kind of impure. 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.

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.

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

Cold, but quite smug. 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.

Yeah. 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.

In a nightdress, yeah. Exactly. And that actually, that is obscured for us behind

all Humbert's games, but it's there nevertheless.

But also when he talks about how Lolita increasingly becomes sort of aloof and

watchful, you know, I think that's also in itself telling.

She has to grow hard.

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. We have gone on far too long. This is actually only part one.

And I think we should score this. Are we going to suggest we score it in

Enchanted Hunters?

Very tasteful. Good. Thank you.

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

I think you should go first.

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 fascinating lines of inquiry.

I think it's a complete masterpiece.

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 a very hackneyed turn of phrase. It is just a

masterpiece. 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 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.

And Humbert Humbert is just matchless.

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

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.

Beautiful book. Then we have American Psycho by Brett 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 Fyodor

Dostoevsky. The Shining by Stephen King.

And of course, if you want to have your say about 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. It's completely free and you can do it at the

book club HQ.

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. The Leader. And what an amazing book,

Tabby. On that, by Michelle.

Bye-bye. Bye.

9-11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

But here's what they don't tell you. The CIA already knew Al-Qaeda was inside the

US. An FBI memo explicitly warned that terrorists were in US flight schools.

So how did he slip through? Why was this red flag ignored?

In this series, we dig into the declassified files to uncover how the

biggest terrorist attack on America was allowed to happen. Get the full story by

listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club,

wherever you get your podcasts.