A Reader's Guide to Nabokov's "Lolita"

Front matter

A READER'S GUIDE TO NABOKOV’S

"ofra"

Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Contents

Abbreviations . s . s s © soe «sas w os savers owu vii Chronology of Nabokov’s Life and Career... on o a a 2. ee eee viii Chronology of Lolita . . s s = s « s e w w w o w w s ewr aws XV

Notes ca 24g ohh e A a a a a se ge a 66 Chapter Five. Humbert’s Memoir, Nabokov’s Novel: A Reader's Analysis. . 67 Foreword s a so-s e es m u s are èa a ee a 67 Part One s sce v e o i ece eo a a e a e 69 Patt TWO. s z e coe u oo u o a a a a o a a a 106 Notes s os see v eem e wcw o ee ee e a 138

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Preface

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most fascinating novels of the twentieth century. Since its publication in the mid 1950s, it has stirred up a tremendous range of responses, from furious outrage to sheer delight. In Humbert Humbert, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Nabokov created a figure of considerable imagination who possesses a remarkable facility with language. At the same time, however, the figure commits heinous acts and coerces a twelve-year-old girl into becoming his reluctant sexual partner. This clash of verbal eloquence and despicable conduct creates a distinctive kind of cognitive dissonance for the reader. My book seeks to guide the reader through the intricacies of Nabokov’s novel and to facilitate an understanding of the writer's elaborate artistic design. I have supplemented a detailed analysis of the work with chapters on its genesis and publication, its precursors in Nabokov’s work and world literature, a discussion of the character of Dolly Haze (Humbert’s “Lolita”), and a commentary on the critical reception and cultural afterlife of the novel. The volume concludes with an annotated bibliography of selected works for further reading. I should note here that Nabokov famously declared that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (L 3). This reader's guide is meant to enhance the experience of both the first-time reader and the devoted rereader; it should in no way be seen as a substitute for the novel itself. Only direct immersion in Nabokov’s text will enable the reader to appreciate the novel's true richness and depth. This brief guide aims to provide readers with the material they may need to grasp the full complexity and sweep of Nabokov’s unique creation.

I would like to thank the Sesquicentennial Fellowship program at the University of Virginia for providing research funding for this project. I dedicate this book to my wife, Monica.

Chapter One THE CREATION OF LOLITA

Vladimir Nabokov declared that the “first little throb” of Lolita went through him in 1939 or early 1940 when he was living in Paris (“On a Book Entitled Lolita”; L 311). As we shall see below, however, the specific theme of an older man being attracted toa much younger woman (orgirl) long predates this period in Nabokov's life. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1939 Nabokov sat down to write his first extended treatment of the Lolita plot: an adult man marries a widow in order to gain access to the widow’s young daughter. This tale, entitled The Enchanter (Volshebnik in Russian), was written from a very different perspective than Lolita. The story of the protagonist's obsession in The Enchanter is told from an external, third-person point of view, whereas Lolita is narrated by the obsessed man himself, and this shift in point of view opened up for Nabokov the opportunity to attempt his daring artistic experiment: he allows his abhorrent criminal protagonist the chance to plead his own case and to cloak his beastly crimes in language and images that are as intriguing as they are disturbing.

Nabokov perhaps had this later perspective in mind when he expanded upon his remark about his “initial throb.” He states that this “initial shiver of inspiration” was prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who was coaxed by a researcher into producing a charcoal drawing. The drawing showed the bars of the “poor creature’s cage” (L 311). If this story has any relevance to Lolita (and curiously, no one has been able to identify the original source of the story, although Brian Boyd speculates that Nabokov may have seen a photograph of a chimpanzee in a London zoo with a paintbrush in his hand’), then it is surely the image of an imprisoned beast drawing the bars of his own cage. Humbert’s narrative not only depicts the chastened criminal locked in prison awaiting trial, but the very words out of which he constructs his narrative form, in a metaphorical sense, the bars of his cage. As he writes in an imagined address to Dolly: “I have only words to play with” (L 32).

Chapter One

Nabokov was unable to publish The Enchanter at the time of its composition, and although he rediscovered the manuscript years later, it did not see the light of day until after his death: it was not published until 1986. Perhaps the failure of this text to appear in print in 1939 or 1940 was fortuitous, for when Nabokov began thinking about the theme again at the end of the 1940s, he did not have to worry about repeating himself in print. His first mention of a new work in progress in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1947 reveals little. He merely states: “I am writing two new things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls — and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea—and 2. a new type of autobiography” (NWL 215; the second project would turn into Speak, Memory). A subsequent description of the novel in a letter to Pascal Covici in 1951 provides a bit more specificity: “I am engaged in the composition of a novel, which deals with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of thirteen” (SL 128). Between these two points, as Nabokov himself put it, he was faced with the difficult task of “inventing America” (L 312).

To ground his story of a middle-aged European man pursuing a young American girl in the details of “real” life, Nabokov conducted research into every aspect of this story. Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov sets forth the kinds of material Nabokov perused and the extent to which he sought specificity for the social and psychological milieu he would create in his novel. He rode local buses to record the way schoolgirls talked with one another. He read manuals on the physical and emotional maturation of adolescent girls. He studied gun catalogues, read teenage magazines, learned the titles of popular songs, and perused Havelock Ellis.? During his journeys across the country in the late 1940s and early 1950s he gathered material for his description of Humbert’s and Dolly's own cross-country trips. Speaking engagements for women’s groups gave him ideas on how to fill in the portrait of Dolly’s mother Charlotte. A night at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto prompted him to record the nerve-jarring noises of the place in images that would find their way into his novel, including “the violent waterfalls of one’s neighbor's toilet.” He read with interest newspaper accounts about the fate of a girl named Florence Sally Horner who had been abducted as an eleven-year-old by a fifty-year-old mechanic named Frank La Salle and kept as a “cross-country love slave” for twenty-one months. As Alexander Dolinin has persuasively demonstrated, Nabokov used key details from this incident in Lolita, and he even has Humbert refer to the incident by name (L 289).*

The Creation of Lolita

Despite his intense work on the project, he occasionally despaired of its ultimate success and, on more than one occasion, he was ready to destroy the notes he had made for the novel. In his essay on Lolita he writes that once or twice he was on the point of burning the unfinished draft but was stopped “by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” (L 312). Nabokov's wife Véra played a key role in this rescue: upon at least one occasion, she saved his papers from the flame.’ The work proceeded slowly, and if he had written a draft of the first twelve chapters of Part One and several passages from Part Two by mid- 1950, it was not until December 6, 1953 that he would write in his diary: “Finished Lolita which was begun exactly 5 years ago.”

Having completed the daunting task of writing the novel, Nabokov now faced the similarly daunting challenge of finding a publisher for the work. Concerned about the security of his teaching position at Cornell, he initially explored the idea of publishing the novel under a pseudonym, but the publishers he contacted discouraged this idea. Nor were they themselves willing to undertake the risk of publishing what would surely be seen as a controversial work. Nabokov approached five American publishers — Viking Press; Simon and Schuster; New Directions; Farrar, Straus and Young; and Doubleday — but all turned him down; several were fearful of the complications that would ensue if the book were to be banned at its release. Nabokov also contacted an agent in France, Doussia Ergaz, to see if she might be able to find a publisher there, and she had better luck. In April 1955 she met Maurice Girodias, the owner of Olympia Press. Unlike his American counterparts, Girodias was happy to take on Nabokov’s project, but the reason for this was apparently not obvious to Ergaz, and certainly not to Nabokov. Eager for success as a publisher, Girodias took under his wing a broad assortment of literature, from works by Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller to outright pornography. In fact, a large number of his titles were targeted at the English-speaking traveler looking for erotica. Several years later, Nabokov wrote that he subsequently pondered the question of whether he would have agreed “so cheerfully” to Girodias publishing Lolita if he had been aware of “what formed the supple backbone of his production.” “Alas,” he writes, “I probably would, though less cheerfully” (SO 271). Cheerfully or not, Nabokov signed a contract with Girodias in June 1955, and the book appeared in two slender paperback volumes in September of that year.

Given its humble origins and the unlikely company in which it was published (other titles produced by Olympia at the time included Until She Screams and How To Do It), Lolita might easily have languished in obscurity

Chapter One if Graham Greene had not named it one of the best books of 1955 in the Christmas edition of London Sunday Times. This declaration led others to look for a copy of the book, and one of those who did, John Gordon, wrote a searing rebuke to Greene in the London Sunday Express at the end of January 1956. Asking “Has Mr. Graham Greene...been pulling the leg of the sedate Sunday Times?” Gordon denounced Lolita as “the filthiest book” he had ever read and “[s]heer unrestrained pornography.” He further declared that anyone who published the novel in England would surely go to prison, and he scolded the Sunday Times for “stepping into the business” of publicizing pornography.’ Greene reacted to Gordon’s criticism with a cutting rebuke of his own in February 1956, and a bracing controversy began percolating. Readers in the United States became acquainted with the dispute when Harvey Breit reported the Greene-Gordon fracas in the New York Times Book Review at the end of February, although he identified Lolita only as a “long French novel about nymphets” with no author's name attached to it.® Breit followed up the story a month later, with more detail about the novel sent to him by reader, and this time he named its author.?

Nabokov was concerned about the charge that his work was pornographic, and he defended his work in nearly identical terms in two letters written in March 1956 (one to Morris Bishop and one to Pascal Covici): “T know that Lolita is my best work so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and the no court could prove it to be ‘lewd and libertine.” He continued: “Lolita is a tragedy. ‘Pornography’ is not an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other” (SL 184, 185).

The controversy brewing in Britain piqued the interest of the American reader, and in the fall of 1956, the first American review of the novel, written by John Hollander, appeared out in the Partisan Review. Hollander was very complimentary in his review, highlighting its comic and parodic elements, and declaring it to be “just about the funniest book I remember having read.” With interest in Lolita on the rise, Nabokov’s supporters in the States saw an opportunity to begin a campaign to publish the novel on these shores. Hoping to smooth the way for the eventual publication of the novel, Jason Epstein of Doubleday developed the idea of using the Anchor Review, a Doubleday publication, to print a large extract from the novel accompanied by an essay from Nabokov (“On a Book Entitled Lolita”) and an introduction by F. W. Dupee. The review came out in 1957. Although the excerpts totaled nearly one hundred pages, the editors tactfully decided to omit some of the passages that would be most likely

The Creation of Lolita to elicit controversy, including some details of Humbert’s early sexual encounter with Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s definition of the “nymphet,” the masturbation scene in the Haze living room, and the night Humbert spent with Dolly in the Enchanted Hunters Hotel. At the same time, the publication of Nabokov’s novel Pnin to high acclaim in March 1957 further bolstered Nabokov’s reputation as a serious writer of talent and distinction.

Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, things were boiling apace. At the urging of the British government, which was disturbed by the prospect of its citizens bringing home pornographic material from France, the French government had decided in December 1956 to ban two dozen Olympia Press titles, with Lolita among them. Maurice Girodias sued the government, the French press took interest in the matter, and by 1957, “laffaire Lolita” was making news. The suit dragged on throughout the year, until Girodias won the case in January 1958 and the ban was temporarily lifted, only to be reimposed under a new law later in the year. It was formally lifted in September 1959."

Hopes for publishing Lolitain America continued to rise during this period, but Nabokov now found himself embroiled in a dispute with Girodias over the rights to publish the novel in the United States. Increasingly frustrated with the demands and evasions of his French publisher, Nabokov was happy to let Walter Minton of G. P. Putnam’s Sons negotiate with Girodias on his behalf. Eventually they came to an agreement, and in March 1958 Nabokov at last signed a contract with Putnam’s to publish Lolita later in the year. Nabokov showed great concern about how his novel might be presented to the public, and in a letter to Minton written on March 1, he put forth his vision about the cover design for the book: “Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile picture for Lolita (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway — that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl” (SL 250; see also SL 256). He returned to this topic a month later: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and rust, after rain. And no girls” (SL 256). He even preferred to have a simple black-and-white cover design rather than one that would offer up a girl's image to whet the reader's imagination. When the novel finally appeared, no female images adorned the simple dust jacket.

The publication of Lolita on August 18, 1958 was accompanied by a host of reviews. Most were positive, but one, by Orville Prescott, called the book both “dull, dull, dull” and “highbrow pornography.”* Walter Minton sent

T

Chapter One

Nabokov a telegram that day reporting: “YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNI- FICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME...BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND” (SL 257). “Excellent demand” indeed: within three days, the novel was into its third printing with 62500 copies in print, and within the first month, the novel had sold over 100000 copies. By the end of September Lolita was at the top of the best seller list where it remained for seven weeks until it was displaced by Boris Pasternak’s recently released Doctor Zhivago.® A movie deal for $150000 was soon signed, and deals to translate the novel into numerous languages followed apace. It would take another year for the novel to be released in Great Britain, but, for the first time since his family’s fortunes had been devastated by the Russian Revolution, Nabokov could look forward to absolute financial security as well as genuine world renown.

1. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 512.

2. See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211; and Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (New York: Random House, 1999), 180.

3. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 184.

4. Alexander Dolinin, “What Happened to Sally Horner? A Real-Life Source of Nabokov’s Lolita,” Zembla, 18 November 2008 <http://www.libraries.psu. edu/nabokov/zembla.htm>.

5. See Schiff, Véra, 166-67; and Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 184.

6. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 169 and 226.

7. Quoted in Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 295; and Michael Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986), 692.

8. Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review, 26 February 1956, 8.

9. Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times Book Review, 11 March 1956, 8.

10. John Hollander, “The Perilous Magic of Nymphets,” Partisan Review 23.4 (1956): 560.

11. See Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 364; and Michael Juliar, Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography, 695.

12. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 18 August 1958, 17.

13. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 365 and 370.

Chapter Two THE PRECURSORS OF LOLITA

Although Nabokov declared that the “first little throb” of Lolita went through him in 1939 or early 1940, the theme the sexual attraction felt by an adult male for a young girl, and the torment that derived from that attraction, had piqued his interest much earlier. A poem composed in Berlin in 1928, entitled “Lilith” (“Lilit” in the original Russian) deals with the subject in a particularly expressive way. The poem begins with the male narrator announcing “I died” and declaring his impression that he is in Paradise. He sees a naked little girl standing in a doorway exposing a “russet armpit,” and this sight triggers a memory of a scene from his youth when he saw the youngest daughter of a miller emerging from the water “all golden / with a wet fleece between her legs” (PP 51). The girl leads him into a house and opens her legs before him. The narrator begins having sex with her, but as he approaches a climax, the girl pulls away, and he finds himself outside the house again, now surrounded by a mob of bleating youngsters. As the crowd increases, the man suddenly “spill[s] his seed” before them all, and he now realizes: “I was in Hell.” When Nabokov published the poem with an English translation in his collection Poems and Problems in 1970, he characteristically warned his readers not to leap to interpretive conclusions about the work: “Intelligent readers will abstain from examining this impersonal fantasy for any links with my later fiction” (PP 55). At the risk of seeming unintelligent, however, we can easily point out some broad affinities between this poem and Nabokov’'s later treatments of the theme, from The Enchanter to Lolita.

To begin with, as in Lolita we find in the poem a first-person narrator describing his sexual attraction to a young girl, an attraction that results in disaster. In describing his initial attraction to the girl, the narrator makes reference to an earlier experience from his own childhood — his observation of the miller’s naked daughter. Corresponding to this episode in Lolita is Humbert’s description of his brief relationship with Annabel Leigh, which left him with a longing that would only be fulfilled in his encounter with Dolly. The overall arc of the plot, in which the protagonist's fantasy of being in paradise is replaced by torment when he discovers that his paradise is only a mask for an underlying hell, is duplicated in Lolita, both in small moments and in the novel as a whole. In Chapter Five of Part One, Humbert tells how he would become sexually aroused by observing through a neighbor's window “what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing” (L 20). As he approaches orgasm, however, the “tender pattern of nudity” he had been looking at is “fiendishly” transformed into the image of a man in his underclothes and Humbert’s “one-sided diminutive romance” ends in a “rich flavor of hell” (L 20). Similarly, after Humbert has first had sexual intercourse with Dolly, he remarks: “Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark — and plunged into a nightmare” (L 140). He subsequently describes the typical motel room they stayed in as “a prison cell of paradise” (L 145) and he characterizes his “elected paradise” as having skies that were “the color of hell-flames” (L 166). What is more, the figure of Lilith (who, according to Talmudic legends, was the first wife of Adam) is herself specifically invoked in Lolita. In Chapter Five of Part One Humbert acknowledges: “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for” (L 20). In the same chapter Humbert comments on how his heart would beat when he spied “a demon child” among an innocent set of children (L 20).

Of course there is one vastly significant difference between “Lilith” and Lolita. In the poem, the girlis depicted as an integral part of a demonic realm. Her youthful age belies her guileful and deceptive nature. Yet although Humbert himself would call Dolly “hopelessly depraved” (L 133) with “nymphean evil” breathing through her pores (L 125), and he would portray himself being in thrall to her power to enchant him, the fact is that there is nothing remotely demonic about her. She appears to the reader as an essentially ordinary girl who becomes the victim of Humbert’s own entrapment. It is he who forces himself upon her repeatedly, and holds her captive for nearly two years. Although the novel retains the poem’s use of a first-person narrative in which the narrator presents himself as the victim of forces beyond his control, the emotional core of the novel lies in the depiction of a young girl’s vulnerability and of the pain that is inflicted upon her by a callous and self-centered adult. In “Lilith” the child’s function is to serve as the agent of the narrator's own torment; she is not given a distinctive personality or individualized identity. In Lolita, in contrast, despite Humbert’s early assertion that his fantasy Lolita has “no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own” (L 62), the emotional richness of the novel stems from the fact that Dolly does have an internal life, with a desires and fears that are distinctly her own, even though they are generally ignored by Humbert.

The treatment of an adult-child interaction in “Lilith” is set in what is appears to be an otherworldly realm. Another early glimpse of this theme occurs in the short story “A Nursery Tale” (“Skazka,” written in 1926), which also displays an otherworldly connection. The tale centers on a demonic contract between a timid man named Erwin and a female incarnation of the devil who grants him the right to enjoy as many women as he desires one night on the condition that he must choose an odd, and not even, number of women during the preceding period from noon to midnight. His first selection is a girl he sees playing with a puppy in a park; his eye avidly recalls every detail of her figure: “the ripple of her verterbrae [...] the tender hollow between her shoulder blades, and [...] fiery strands in her chestnut hair” (Stories 165). Later in the evening he sees a “tall elderly man in evening clothes with a little girl walking beside — a child of fourteen or so in a low-cut black party dress.” As he looks at the girl's face, he finds something odd about it, and he thinks “if she were not just a little girl— the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt — one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge” (Stories 170). This girl becomes his twelfth selection, and Erwin realizes he must choose one more to achieve an odd number. Finally he sees a woman walking ahead of him, and he rushes to overtake her. He wonders: “What enticed him?” It’s not her shape, he thinks, but “something else, bewitching and overwhelming [...] mere fantasy, maybe, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy” (Stories 171). As he finally catches up to her, he suddenly recognizes her as “the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup” (Stories 171), and he realizes that he has broken the terms of his contract: his thirteenth choice is the same as his first; the resulting number is even, not odd.

Two things should be noted in Nabokov’s handling of the adult-child attraction theme here. First is the sense of utter enchantment that the adult feels in the presence of the child. His sight of her catapults him into the realm of desperate fantasy and desire. Second is the ultimate outcome of this desire. As in “Lilith,” the man’s attempt to realize his fantasy results in failure and loss. It is as if in Nabokov’s world such transgressive desire inevitably invites punishment, and this pattern holds true for the subsequent, more pronounced treatments of the theme.

Several scholars have detected a precursor of the situation depicted in Lolita in Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark (Kamera obskura, published 1932-1933). The central protagonist of the novel, Albert Albinus (Krechmar [Kretschmar] in the Russian original) is a married man who becomes infatuated with a sixteen-year-old movie theater attendant. Ultimately he abandons his wife and child for the younger woman (named Margot in the English-language version and Magda in the Russian original), and as if in fulfillment of the saying “Love is blind,” he loses his sight in a car accident. He is subsequently tormented by Margot and her former lover, Axel Rex (Robert Gorn [Horn] in the Russian), whose role as Albinus’s nemesis has been compared to that of Clare Quilty in Lolita. It should be noted, however, that at sixteen, Margot is significantly older than Dolly at twelve, and as Nabokov himself declared: “Margot was a common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita” (SO 83).

A foreshadowing of the core plot of Lolita also shows up in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift (Dar), which appeared in Russian in installments in 1937 and 1938 (with the exception of Chapter Four), and as a book (with all chapters intact) in 1952. One of the characters, the stepfather of Zina Mertz, the protagonist's love, tells the protagonist about an idea for a novel he would write if he had the opportunity:

Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog — but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness — gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl— you know what I mean — when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind [...] What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely — the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot —a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? (Gift 186)

Although this character may be giving voice to some private fantasies he may have had about his own stepdaughter, the story line he presents is not developed in The Gift. Nabokov, however, would return to the idea of a man marrying a widow to gain access to her young daughter in one of the last prose pieces he wrote in Russian, the short novel The Enchanter (Volshebnik), which is the very work he discusses in his essay on Lolita in connection with his recollection of the “first little throb” of the later novel (L 311-12). When Nabokov wrote his essay on Lolita, he believed that he had destroyed the work after moving to America in 1940, but he subsequently discovered it among his papers in 1959, and it was eventually translated into English by his son Dmitri to be published in 1986.

The Enchanter is the clearest precursor in Nabokov’s work to Lolita, and the affinities between the two are numerous. The title character is a dealer in gems who burns with a secret desire for young girls and thinks of it as a “unique flame” (En 21). Like Humbert, he claims that only certain girls excite this desire: “I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it” (En 23). This anticipates Humbert’s extended discussion of the difference between his enchanting “nymphets” and ordinary girls: “are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not [...] Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of [...] ordinary [...] essentially human little girls” (L 16-17). The Enchanter's protagonist regards himself as protective of a child’s innocence: “I cannot even consider the thought of causing pain or provoking unforgettable revulsion. Nonsense — I'm no ravisher” (En 22). We can compare this to Humbert’s protestations: “Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child” (L 19-20); “We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do” (L 88).