‘Lo, Dolly

Speak, memory. It was 1947, October, maybe November. I was in the Ramsdale Orpheum with my Uncle Eddie watching his pal Dutch Reagan in one of those feel good war shorts, when she walked in with her mom and the man we later came to know as Humbert Humbert and sat down in front of us. I don’t think she knew who I was, except for some guy in her seventh grade class. I was reviewing books, even back then, for our weekly school newspaper, the Woolgatherer, and Dolly wasn’t what you’d call a book type, not back then anyway. But she smiled at me as she sat down and asked if she could have some of my popcorn. Then the feature came on, and I didn’t think much about it. But years later, when Mr. Nabokov’s book came out, I got a postcard from Uncle Eddie. “Wasn’t she that extraordinary girl at the movies?” He remembered.

And now, an Italian woman named Pia Pera has written a second book about Dolly Haze. Or rather, she’s put her name on the cover of a book called “Lo’s Diary” that claims to be the journal that Dolly kept. Beginning shortly before Monsieur Humbert took up residence in the Haze household, “Lo’s Diary” exposes a Lolita that the middle-aged nymphetophile never knew--the true Lolita. “It struck me,” Humbert wrote toward the end of Nabokov’s book, “that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate--dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.” So it was with trembling fingers that I opened “Lo’s Diary” in search of a twilight and a palace gate, a return to the Ramsdale Orpheum and buttered popcorn.

Alas, no garden and no palace. With a few exceptions, “Lo’s Diary” merely rearranges the furniture in the Haze residence and redirects Dolly’s travels from a vantage point three feet to the right of Humbert’s on the front seat of the Haze sedan. The Ramsdale of our Nabokovian youth becomes Goatscreek; the Pisky of Dolly’s birth becomes Whiskey. The occasional references Nabokov made to our Ramsdale classmates and Camp Climax bunkmates are blown into scenes and stories so banal that I would have been laughed all the way to the malt shop if I had published them in the Woolgatherer. Dolly’s first period--”I keep getting whiffs of this smell that makes me choke.” Dolly’s first time--”I feel like a stick of fire that pushes wet and hot.”

The few bits of news--how Dolly’s original father used to fondle her while electrocuting lizards in their Whiskey garage, how Dolly once tortured a pet hamster with a light bulb (take that, Bret Easton Ellis)--are as stinky and cancerous as Freud’s pipe. Even Dolly’s interest in atomic physics (no bimbo she!), nurtured by the bomb tests in the Bikinis (islands, not swimsuits), decays into a kind of feminist cant that had a half-life of a nanosecond back in the early ‘70s: “The first information from the Bikinis has been published. To determine the effect of the bomb, they cut up living animals--sow No. 311 became sterile, which is an advantage since otherwise she might have produced dangerous offspring, populating the whole earth with enormous pigs who would eat men instead of acorns. An old man, sixty-six, who raped a girl of fourteen was imprisoned in San Quentin, but that is independent of the effect of the radiation. That was a plain old preatomic pig.”

*

Members of the jury, I assert that this is not, cannot be, the true Lolita. “A great French doctor once told my father,” Humbert says, according to Nabokov, “that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same ‘voice.’ ” This is not Lolita’s voice in “Lo’s Diary,” it is not even in the same family as the voices from Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and that, I submit to you, is the book’s greatest failing. The voice that has been given to the “unknown” Lolita, the “silent” Lolita, sounds as false and ungainly as the squeaky mewls of a vamp who never made it into the talkies, all gastric gurgle and no substance, lacking that complex human larynx that we call a soul. It is a voice without love and without pain. The report of the death of her mother draws less remark than the cystitis she suffers following her first sexual bout with Humbert. Lost, irrevocably lost, is the intensely diabolical and supremely feminist whammy Humbert puts to the end of Part One of Nabokov’s account of Lolita’s capitulation: “You see, she had nowhere else to go.”

The voice under the Italian Straw Hat is of an Italian academic, not the Lolita I saw in a halo against the screen of the Ramsdale Orpheum. Signora Pera’s Lolita Project has the scent, not of a novel, but of the kind of English assignment my own 12-year old niece routinely gets at school (write an “undiscovered” chapter to “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of another character). This license to daydream with the greats is catnip for adolescent pussycats but heroin for professionals. Edward Albee’s stage version of “Lolita” turned into a fantastic flop on Broadway. According to Albee’s biography, the producer, the director and the star, Donald Sutherland, cut the script wherever they saw fit and occasionally even rejiggered the play with pages from the novel. Meanwhile, outside the theater, 50 women representing Women Against Pornography shouting, “Incest isn’t sexy, rape isn’t funny,” protested the very existence of the show. Everyone, it seems, knows what’s best for Lolita.

It takes a strong arm, after all, to wrestle with the angels, light and dark. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” is an A-plus play because Tom Stoppard wisely chose to chronicle the fate of two very minor but key players from “Hamlet”--imagine if he had essayed a musical version titled “Ophelia!” Pera vs. Nabokov is a contest so overmatched that it was almost declared illegal (Nabokov’s son Dmitri successfully sued for copyright infringement and finally settled for a royalty agreement in which he went Dutch with Pera). And ultimately, as Humbert had to kill his nemesis Clare Quilty at the end of “Lolita,” so do those of us who knew Dolly have to protest Pera’s Lo. “One had to choose between him and H.H.,” Humbert said, pleading his defense, “and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

Meanwhile, Uncle Eddie and I share that moment in the dim cave of our memory, the memory of our Dolly, our Lolita, a certain silhouette against the big screen of the Ramsdale Orpheum. “We think not in words,” Nabokov once said, “but in the shadow of words.”