Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, With Unexpected Fodder for a Controversial Film)

“Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: ‘What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?’
She replied: ‘Ulalume -Ulalume—
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’"—American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “Ulalume”

It’s possible that I read this poem a very long time ago, but I forgot about it until it was used, to very sly effect, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

This poem does not appear in the novel, but Edgar Allan Poe is very much present. What Nabokov uses as his point of reference is the poet’s “Annabel Lee.”

I’m not sure why Kubrick substituted “Ulalume” for “Annabel Lee,” but I’ll hazard a guess. In the novel, Lolita reminds Humbert Humbert of his long-lost love, Annabel Leigh.

Kubrick had to run a legendary censorship gauntlet to get Lolita released at all. (Indeed, its poster featured the memorable tagline, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”) 

A couple of the most memorable lines from “Annabel Lee”—"I was a child and she was a child,/In this kingdom by the sea”—would only have reinforced the qualms of anyone asked to okay for general release a film featuring an unnatural relationship between an older man and a child.

Instead, in the film, the Poe allusion functions simultaneously as satiric and tragic.

The satire comes at the expense of Humbert, who offers a literary lesson to the vulgar American girl who has caught his gaze, Lolita. (James Mason and Sue Lyon, in the accompanying picture, played the two.)

The visiting European professor can’t help but reveal his pretentiousness by identifying the poem’s author as “the divine Edgar”—no last name needed!—and by pointing out how “my favorite poet” “emphasizes” and “twists” certain words.

It’s all a bit much for Lolita: “Well, I think it's a little corny, to tell you the truth.”

At the same time, the first four lines quoted above parallel what the deviant Humbert hopes to do with Lolita as his own goddess of beauty, particularly in the seduction verbs chosen: “pacified,” “kissed,” “tempted,” and “conquered”—all moving through “the end of the vista,” or the cross-country trip in which he kidnaps her.

But it can’t end well for Lolita, who is fated, like Ulalume, to end up in “this legended tomb”—leaving the seducer and abuser Humbert desolate in knowing that, in robbing her of innocence, he has played an inexpungible part in her tragedy.

(For a fascinating take on how Kubrick and producer James B. Harris edited down Nabokov's 400-page long adapted screenplay until only 20 percent was left, see Koraljka Suton's October 2022 post from the blog "Cinephilia and Beyond.")

Quote of the Day (Vladimir Nabokov, on Reading a Book for the First Time)

“When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.”—Russian-born American novelist-critic-poet-memoirist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Lectures on Literature (1980)

Quote of the Day (Vladimir Nabokov, on Rain)

“How mobile is the bed on these

nights of gesticulating trees

when the rain clatters fast,

the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof

trotting upon an endless roof,

traveling into the past.”— Russian-born American novelist-memoirist-poet Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), “Rain,” in The Portable Nabokov, edited by Page Stegner (1971)

This has been an unusually rainy season. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times, in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve awakened to hear rain on the roof.

Nabokov—much better known, of course, for his scandalous novel Lolita—demonstrates here his facility with a different genre: poetry. I wonder how his work might have turned out if he had pursued poetry as avidly as the novel—or, for that matter, collecting and classifying butterflies?

(I took the attached photo of this rain-slicked street while on vacation nearly three months ago at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.)

 

This Day in Tennis History (Death of Bill Tilden, Fallen ‘Golden Age’ Great)

June 5, 1953—He had dominated his sport as few if any athletes have ever done, before or since. But when Bill Tilden died at age 60 in a Los Angeles boarding house, he was alone, down to his last $88, and shunned by a tennis community that once lionized him. More than 60 years before Jerry Sandusky, he had shocked sports-mad America by being arrested and jailed twice for illicit relations with youths. 

In the 1920s “Golden Age of Sports,” “Big Bill” ranked with baseball’s Babe Ruth, golf’s Bobby Jones, boxing’s Jack Dempsey, and football’s Red Grange as undisputed masters. His arsenal—chops, slices, spins, along with a “Cannonball” serve all the more devastating for being so uncommon and unexpected—utterly unnerved opponents.  His record atop his sport was astonishing:

 * the only man to have won the American singles title six years in a row;

* America’s top-ranked player every year between 1924 and 1934;

* the first American to win at Wimbledon, which he did on three times, the last occasion at age 38.

The physical grace with which he carried himself on court was belied by his determination to reach the top. Unlike many of today’s players, he not only started late in the sport, but even then did not display particular ability for a while. (He couldn’t even make his college team at the University of Pennsylvania, and did not reach the finals at Forest Hills until he was 25.) 

Once he became a champion, Tilden was intent on playing “my own sweet game," which could involve:

*deliberately making mistakes and falling behind to make his matches more competitive;

*imitating his opponent’s game just to see if he could do it better; and

*giving points away when he felt a line judge made a mistake in his favor.

The tennis court was never really a big enough arena for Tilden. He also aspired to the stage and screen, even though his acting ability was, at best, limited. (He only got to play Dracula on Broadway by ponying up the money himself.) He counted stars like Charlie Chaplin, Katharine Hepburn, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as friends, and even gave some tennis lessons.

In one of his avocations, author, Tilden inadvertently anticipated his own fall, in a novel called Glory's Net (1930), when the protagonist’s career and personal life disintegrate. For a long time, he had managed to repress his homosexual instincts. But after his travels in his late 30s, particularly in Weimar Berlin, his associations with youths became more noticeable—and dangerous. 

One who had taken note of this was Vladimir Nabokov. His novel Lolita features a former tennis champion that Humbert Humbert allows to teach the title character knowing that this gay instructor will never seduce the girl. As if the circumstances surrounding this former pro hadn’t been enough of a clue to the inspiration, Nabokov planted a clue in his name, Ned Litam – a characteristically wicked bit of wordplay, “Ma Tilden” spelled backwards.

His reputation was becoming so bad into the Forties that teenage boys who practiced with him were advised not to get into a car or a room alone with him. Then, within three years, he was jailed twice—first for engaging in a sexual act with a teenage prostitute on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, then for groping a teenage hitchhiker.

After that, Tilden became a pariah—blackballed by clubs that once threw wide its doors for him, and even erased from the register of graduates maintained by his alma mater, Penn. As late as last year, an attempt to erect a plaque honoring his accomplishments at the entrance of Tilden’s home court, the Germantown Cricket Club, was rejected. His case, not unlike the Metropolitan Opera's James Levine, throws into sharp relief the question of how much to continue to honor a figure of major accomplishments whose conduct exceeds social norms and the law.

This Day in Literary History (Nabokov’s “Lolita” Published in U.S.)

August 18, 1958—Taking a chance that four other American publishers had passed on, G.P. Putnam published Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, without disruption. 

In fact, the novel would not face the same legal difficulties that had bedeviled it in Europe, where the authorities in Great Britain and France imposed censorship bans because of Nabokov’s explosive subject: pedophilia. Just remember to tell that to the next jaded Continental who kvetches about us “puritanical Americans”!

The novel almost didn’t see the light of day at all:

1) After “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov carried his manuscript and all his notecards out to the incinerator behind his house before his wife Vera prevailed on him not to give up on the project.

2) Just finding a publisher became an ordeal. Despite the reputation he earned as a superb stylist in his memoir Speak, Memory (1948), the Russian émigré’s 12th novel (and his third in English) was considered radioactive. Nabokov had to go to Paris to find a publisher: Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press. The author was evidently unaware of Girodias’ reputation as a self-described “gentleman-pornographer”—someone who not only published the likes of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, and John Cleland, but also figures with less literary, far raunchier content.

The tale of Humbert Humbert and his infatuation with nymphet Dolores Haze—aka Lolita—caused considerable consternation in Europe. 

Publishing an English-language title in Paris might have seemed at the time a surefire way to slip the book under the censors’ radar, but it didn’t work—the book ended up banned for two years. 

In England, while one critic called it “the filthiest book I have ever read” (probably ensuring at least another 5,000 copies sold), novelist Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year.

(Greene’s praise was not necessarily an unalloyed blessing. British readers with long memories would have recalled the novelist’s controversial comment over 20 years ago in his job as a film critic, where comments on Shirley Temple’s “dimpled depravity” and “neat and well-muscled rump” put him in the crosshairs of a libel suit by Twentieth Century Fox.)

All of this hullabaloo ensured that Lolita found a receptive audience when it was published stateside. It sold 2,600 copies on its first day in the bookstores and 100,000 copies in its first three months of publication, duplicating Gone With the Wind’s startling achievement of two decades earlier.

I first read the novel in Ann Douglas’ excellent Postwar American Literature class at Columbia University in 1982. 

I was unprepared for one aspect of its structure: it’s a road novel. It didn’t strike me at the time, but it followed by a year another novel in that course in which a protagonist took to America’s highways: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (In fact, a CNN story on Lolita even includes an interactive map.)

The émigré Nabokov’s take on America is far less Whitmanesque, far more satiric than Kerouac’s. The country that the European intellectual Humbert discovers is, like Lolita herself, innocent if somewhat trashy. 

It was a nation that was already experimenting with the motels and strip centers that proliferated. especially once the interstate highway system (created only a couple of years before) came into its own.

Nabokov—a frequent road traveler himself in pursuit of his hobby of collecting butterflies—was so inspired by the oddball names he discovered in atlases that he came up with shameless puns such as this: “We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop 1,001.”

(Speaking of Soda…Do you think that George Costanza of Seinfeld might have read this novel? At first, I might have said no. Portnoy’s Complaint would have been too close for comfort; Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillane, with their lack of artistry, would have appealed to someone like him who never let grace get in the way of a move on a woman, as witnessed his pursuit of Marisa Tomei. But if not from Nabokov, what the heck else could have inspired Seinfeld’s Sancho Panza to provide a couple with the name “Soda” for their child?)

Lolita was not the first major American novel to treat child molestation—in the 1930s, Nicole Diver of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night and Gloria Wandrous of John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 were both abuse victims. 

But these books featured third-person narrators who considered the victims as adults suffering the aftereffects of abuse. That increases the distance and coolness with which readers view the sordid events.

In contrast, Lolita makes it impossible to turn away:

* The female victim is not an adult looking back, but a pre-pubescent;
* The elaborate seduction and subsequent acts are described rather than summarized or implied;
* The narrator is the predator himself, who employs humor and even addresses the reader as “Brother” on at least one occasion—a wheedling attempt at self-justification by a man who comes to indict himself more for robbing a girl's innocence than for murdering an even worse pervert (Clare Quilty) than himself.

The name “Lolita” has become synonymous with young girls of dangerously budding sexuality. Amy Fisher, of course, was the “Long Island Lolita”; Sharon Stone’s daughter in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, who disorients Bill Murray with her lack of clothing, also is named after the Nabokov character.

And, despite his disdain for Freud, Nabokov has become the paramount creator of a psychological type, in the same manner that Machiavelli now stands for a style of politics removed from standards of morality or behavior. 

In “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” the main character in the song by The Police “starts to shake and cough/Just like the old man in/That book by Nabokov.” (A slight error—Humbert is middle-aged—but the idea of a dirty old man appeals to the common stereotype in this type of case.)

One last note: Nabokov might have drawn at least some of his inspiration from a real-life case involving a New Jersey girl, according to Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin of the University of Wisconsin. 

Florence Sally Horner, an 11-year-old Camden girl, was blackmailed by middle-aged car mechanic Frank LaSalle, who had caught her shoplifting a five-cent notebook. The two then spent the next 21 months on the road, like Humbert and Lolita, before Horner turned in her kidnapper.

In her attempt to regain a normal life, Lolita died in childbirth; Sally Horner’s life also ended tragically with her death in an auto accident at age 15. LaSalle—euphemistically called a “moral leper” by the judge—received a 30-35 year prison sentence for kidnapping.