Nabokov’s best & creepiest con with Lolita (1955) was to make gruesome Humbert Humbert aspirational for provincial American men like Epstein & Allen. thedailybeast.com/inside-woody-a…
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Humbert signals at every turn that he’s nothing more than a depraved child rapist. But he’s also “a bronzed glamor boy.”
And the hotness, French phrases & prose tricks make American male readers swoon.
Humbert signals at every turn that he’s nothing more than a depraved child rapist. But he’s also “a bronzed glamor boy.”
And the hotness, French phrases & prose tricks make American male readers swoon.
In 1934, Fitzgerald had written another child rapist in Tender is the Night. He was rich but broken & hateful. He was the villain of the book & he knew it.
Nicole Diver’s father:
Nicole Diver’s father:
It’s astounding how smoothly in the 20thc child rape became a proxy for the avant garde & a hallmark of worldliness. The signature transgression cd have been anything—polyamory, bisexuality etc—& child rape was formerly seen as something that happened on farms, like bestiality...
...but overnight any man trapped in middle-class life, suddenly needed the delicacy of an American girl to break into his overman power as an artist. American Beauty, Lost in Translation, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris.
Someone who understood this early is Scarlett Johansson, who had already played many underage “muse” figures by the time she was 18 & I profiled her. I was floored by how well she explained the dynamic & how central it is to so many American movies.
nytimes.com/2003/09/07/mov…
nytimes.com/2003/09/07/mov…
Oh for Pete's sake I'm not trying to cancel Nabokov OR claim he was a moral superstar. Just to point again to the brilliant complexity of the novel that seems as much about a pedophilic relationship between Europe & America as anything else. In other news: the-tls.co.uk/articles/super…
Seems I have to add that I’m praising the novel for the moral pressure it exerts on readers. Not blaming it for egging Epstein or Allen on. As if...
In short the novel asks: “What of your American principles & antipathies would you give up to gain postwar Euro sophistication?”
In short the novel asks: “What of your American principles & antipathies would you give up to gain postwar Euro sophistication?”
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