The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like morning snow storms of used tissue paper. While a college student, in London and Paris, my studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry; but a peculiar exhaustion set in and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates.
A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey" was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon a “Short History of English Poetry” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties--and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.
I found a job--teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where children ignited my own long-term hopes for fatherhood, but, alas, with no suitable mother in sight.
I still thought often of Annabel, occasionally musing that we had, in our summer of love, been the same age as these pale girls in the schools I visited, with their matted lashes and vacant faces. These children could not conjugate verbs—could they feel passion as I had for Annabel on that enchanted island of time? Even today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful love of my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained open forever.
No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of women; inwardly, I was consumed by a hell. The human females I was allowed to date were but palliative agents. All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my desires quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. While a voice like my father’s said, “Have fun,” a voice like Sybil’s said, “At what cost?” One moment I was ashamed and frightened for the way I was using and disposing of women, another recklessly optimistic. I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that it was the most natural thing in the world, being moved to distraction by women.
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. So life went. A shipwreck. An atoll. How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, women strolled freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen, and how quickly they noticed me when I was ready to make myself known. Intelligence, wit, are these not the mating dances of our day? Does the scholar not bury himself in books at the prospect of future successes and, thus, encounters?
Once a perfect beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and righten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. I spoke, she smiled, and so began a three-week affair before I tossed her out of my home without emotion or explanation. I could list a great number of these diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.
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One man's chapter-by-chapter quest to remove the pedophilia from Nabokov's Lolita.
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Welcome. Perhaps you’re here because you and I share a love for the wit and poetry found in Nabokov’s classic, Lolita. For a book fan, Lolita is a trove of voice, alliteration, character, plot, assonance, and mood. It’s chock-full of references and culture. But—and for the morally discriminating reader, there’s always that but—it’s the account of a child rapist, told with fluctuating, insufficient remorse. The narrator’s moral depravity left this reader unsatisfied and I doubt I am alone.
My solution: put on my editor hat go to work, creating an alternate edition of Nabokov’s masterwork, Lolita, Scrubbed. In this new (and I hope, improved) version, I seek to retain the lovable poetry of the book’s original text while excising the book’s amoral core. And while I make no claims to be a writer of Nabokov’s caliber, I plan to “re-see” troubling scenes as the author would, were he convinced of the novel’s problematic nature. I also plan, in an effort to make the book more “of our times,” to apply light cuts here and there in areas where I feel the language goes a little overboard.
I ask fans of the original text to not confuse my re-seeing as “censorship.” I do not wish to see Nabokov’s book banned or burned. I only wish to humbly present a new version, to be enjoyed and evaluated on its own merit. And lest you think I’m a total buzz-kill, there’s still a juicy murder plot at the heart of the story. Enjoy!
- Gerard Kibbey, June 2009
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