Literary Detective #2


Who Was Humbert Humbert?

 

 

There is no attempt to identify a model for Humbert Humbert in the Annotated Lolita.  The novel often echoes Poe (who married a fourteen-year-old cousin), and sometimes Lewis Carroll, whose peculiar interest in young girls would land him in jail today. The annotated version was produced with Nabokov’s cooperation, and in his gentlemanly way Nabokov was careful not to reveal information which might embarrass living people. (In the case of a certain kinky tennis player, though, enough information was given to make it easy enough to track him down).

 

There is, however, a plausible candidate to be the “original Humbert”. Umberto Saba was an Italian poet from Trieste, where he was a neighbor of  James Joyce. He wrote personal, unmodernist poems in pure classical Italian, and has come to be regarded as one of the three great Italian poets of the first half of the twentieth century, along with Ungaretti and Montale.

 

Saba, the genteel proprietor of a bookshop, was the most mild-mannered of men, but in the words of a friend, “he loved the girls and he loved the boys; he loved the men and he loved the women.” Among his poems are a number of erotic poems about boys and girls which tend not to be translated into English.[i]

 

I am less able to fake it in Italian than in several other languages, but “È mezza bambina e mezza bestia. Eppure l'ami” (“She’s half baby girl and half animal – and yet I love her”) and “Maria ti guarda con gli occhi un poco come Venere loschi” (“The Virgin Mary watches you with the sleazy eyes of Venus”) seem explicit enough.

 

In Lolita, Humbert’s origins were on the French Riviera, and in an earlier sketch which Nabokov discarded, the Humbert-figure was vaguely Eastern European. Saba's Trieste is probably as close as you can get to an Eastern European / Riviera cross. Saba died in 1957, and Lolita was published in 1954 [ii], so Nabokov’s rule about not embarrassing the living would have required him not to mention Saba directly, while still allowing him to leave us some clues. The fact that Saba was almost unknown in the English-speaking world at that time, and is hardly famous here now, further protected him.

 

Saba did some of the things that William Burroughs and other avant-garde heroes did, but he didn’t aspire to be a Satanic figure the way Burroughs and the others did. He was just an example of a kind of snuffy kinkiness which seems to have been fairly common in pre-WWII Europe, and perhaps even today, but which has always been shocking to Americans. Nabokov was careful to dissociate himself from Humbert, and he made sure that Humbert died miserably, but I doubt that he found him shocking in the same way that most of his American readers did.

 

The terrible thing that Nabokov shows us was that Lolita was Humbert's captive and had nowhere else to go. As for the purity of childhood, however, she was already not a virgin when Humbert seduced her,  having done a bit of experimentation the summer before with the boy at the lake.[iii]

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Three of Saba's "fanciulla" poems

[i] The Italian words are fanciullo “boy” (plural fanciulli, which can also just mean “children") and fanciulla “girl” (plural fanciulle). For me, with my limited knowledge of Italian, there’s quite a bit of ambiguity in these poems. Sometimes it seems that Saba, like Proust, is pretending that a boy is a girl, and other times I wonder whether he was sexualizing actual children, or whether he was just  role-playing childish fantasies with legal young adults. There probably are answers to these questions, but I don’t have them.

I’d also like to file a complaint here about the bilingual dictionaries of the world, most of which stubbornly refuse to list plurals and other inflected forms separately, even in a case like fanciulli, which has the additional meaning, “children”, and is not just the plural of the singular “boy”.

In Lolita, Humbert Humbert points out that the age of consent for girls in Roman law, Church law, and American law has been as low as twelve, and seldom higher than fifteen – but only within marriage, and with the consent of the parents. He also makes snarky remarks about the Mann Act (which has to do mostly with women)  and is fully aware of the American "Children and Young Persons Act of 1933", according to which a "child" is younger than fourteen, and a "young person" is between fourteen and seventeen.
 

[ii]  Lolita was published three years before Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, making it the first great  American  “road novel”. Travel through Colorado is featured in both novels, as it was in the lives of their authors. Someone should put the timelines on a map to see whether Nabokov, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Humbert Humbert, Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, et al, were ever at the same place at the same (real or fictional) time. 

I have a personal stake in this, because in 1946, before I was born, my father (still in the military) and my pregnant mother went on a long trip from Wisconsin to Texas to Colorado to South Dakota to Minnesota, and I have calculated that they passed through Denver at about the same time that Cassady was leaving Denver to go to New York. (And also -- Neal Cassady's father, like Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and my grandmother,  was born in Sioux City, Iowa).

[iii] We are in a most peculiar place these days with respect to juvenile sexuality. The whole public space is intensely sexualized, adult sexual mores are free and easy, and few parents really expect chastity from their teenagers.   Yet there’s a constant uproar about child abuse, and the threshold of childhood has been raised to eighteen in most states.  It seems to be assumed now, even by the liberated, that any relationship between an older and a younger partner is sick.

Against this, there is plenty of testimony (e.g. Margeurite Duras’s The Lover) about May-September romances which were positive for both partners – granted that almost all love affairs end more or less badly. Many of the medieval romances I have studied have heroines  who are thirteen to fifteen years old: Menina e Moça, Aucassin et Nicolette, Romeo and Juliet, and also some of the stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In all these stories the young lady is portrayed as hot to trot -- though in most cases the boy is about the same age as the girl.  

In my own college experience, back in the early sixties when the Sexual Revolution was not yet quite rampant, "don't ask / don't tell" faculty-student relationships, both gay and straight, were quite common. I was seriously hustled by one of the professors, and least two classmates married faculty members immediately after graduation.

I still see one of them occasionally. She's still married to the same guy, who's only eight years older than she is. When I met her at a recent reunion I suggested that her marriage be annulled, and she laughed.

(No, I don’t have any underage skeletons in my closet. Why do you ask? I do remember a lot of that stuff going on in the sixties, though.)

 

I am emersonj at gmail dot com

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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