business" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His
daughter, "Louise," is by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a student
in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida.
Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn
girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlemen in the remotest
Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be
publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her
best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no
ghosts walk.
Viewed simply as a novel, "Lolita" deals with situations and emotions
that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression
been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single
obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine
who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a
lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by
their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an
editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might
call "aphrodisiac" (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered
December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably
more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of "Lolita"
altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of
sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in
the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than
a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the
same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that "H.H."'s impassioned
confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult
males--a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann
(verbal communication)--enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special
experience "H.H." describes with such despare; that had our demented diarist
gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there
would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this
book.
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in
his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a
synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original,
and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.
I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, is is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and
jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to
attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on
the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty
that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of
diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically
