In October 1816 John Keats wrote ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’: an expression of internal surprise and hunger:
‘Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’.
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene’.
Incidentally this, aside from a few simple samples read to me in my cradle and then bed, was my first experience of the Romantics. It was during a spell of home-education, led by my mother, who had me read Robert Fagles’ masterful translations of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. I read Keats’ poem as ‘related material’ and gained an infatuation. I devoured the entire triad: Shelley, Byron and Keats, but didn’t much care for Wordsworth or Blake, finding the first too pastoral and the second too zealous. This childish response, however, has abetted and I have enjoyed the ‘waters, rolling from their mountain-springs’ and found ‘Eternity in an hour’.
I grew older, read more (attended an anarchistic school) and met a fascinating Israeli boy, a year my senior. We would write each other long, laborious emails, declaring love for this and loathing for that. In one email he mentioned his anger when his English class had not heard of ‘Nabokov’, complaining that he had reached the fame of a pop-writer. This was embarrassing and weakened my intellectual pretence: I googled (ugly, hateful verb) and found him to have authored a book about a paedophile, pretended to have read the book and forgot, almost, all about him.
Except I didn’t: that austere and exotic name appeared everywhere. First, on vacation in Brazil, I chanced upon Mashen'ka. I read it, as I read everything on that emotionally difficult trip and was almost completely disappointed, leaving off halfway: an almost unforgivable mistake. I was, however, left remembering the scene in the elevator between Lev and Aleksey:
‘Alfyorov’s voice faded away for a dew moments, and when it sounded again there was an unpleasant lilt to it, probably because the speaker was smiling.’
Nabokov is what he notices: that a smile causes a lilt, that a solitary hair on a cake of soap is the most revolting thing in the house of a friend or the connection (to the aristocrat) between ‘the leather of books, and the leather of boxing gloves.’
A few months later a female friend of mine began having an illicit affair, she had only just turned 15, he was a university student, and had borrowed a book he had just read: Lolita. One night at my house, she was staying over, we read me a few chapter detailing Humbert’s adventures in motels. (Her copy pictured Lo’ holding a book or magazine (next to the Amis quote) that obscured her face, the student had painted eyes onto this book.)We lay curled up together, the room became hot and sticky and my skin burned. Could someone really write this? With such force, such… a lack of vulgarity and a surplus of enchantment. Nabokov had become my prey, I his enchanted hunter.
I told my Ada about this magical book: we obsessed over it, each buying a copy to take with us to America. She has it like this:
‘we read it passionately through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I think we both fell quite into the deep depths of Darkbloom.’
Oh she’s right: but ‘depths’ do not quite tell the half of it, ‘depths’ allow the grip to much slack. No other book has curdled such a desire in me. I wanted to write from ‘this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’ Nabokov infected me, Nabokov tortured me because I know I shall never capture his secrets.
If I could have I would have written my own ‘On First Looking into…’ mine would express more feeling, more pain and suffering, more desperation and more idolatry. For now, I think it is worth remembering the inspiration for Humbert’s girl child for two reasons. Firstly, because Poe was a crazed genius. Secondly and more importantly, because to know that Nabokov, someone who declared that he had learned ‘Nothing’ from Joyce, saw something worth stealing in a little poem allows for a little hope.
‘I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.’
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.’
The seraphs would not covet Humbert’s Lo’, but I think they’d covet Nabokov’s Lolita.
