R E C E N T L Y

Reality bites
By Karen Grigsby Bates
By making the irrelevant Mike Tyson case a big PR issue, NOW demonstrates again that it's run by imperious, out-of-touch white women
(07/30/98)

The dictator in the house
By Ros Davidson
The dark side of polygamy
(07/29/98)

Sins of the fathers
By Ros Davidson
A polygamist's tale
(07/28/98)

The Merry Recluse
By Caroline Knapp
A single woman chooses a life of solitude in the Land of We
(07/27/98)

Mulatto millennium
By Danzy Senna
When being "mixed" is cool
(07/24/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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______________ONLY A NYMPHET MYSELF
______________WHEN I FIRST MET NABOKOV'S
______________LOVE CHILD, MY PASSION
______________FOR "LOLITA" IS STILL
______________GOING STRONG TODAY.
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BY JUSTINE BROWN | I wept bitterly when I first read Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." A lady named Carol, who parachuted into my life like a '70s Mary Poppins and quickly became a friend, slipped me the book. In retrospect, I see a warning featured prominently: Be aware. She presented the book by way of proscription -- to alert me to the erotic power of nubiles and the pitfalls of that power, to the magnetism of 12-year-old girls, for some men. It was 1977, I was 12 and so was Brooke Shields. "Pretty Baby" was shedding its soft Penthouse glow in movie houses around the world, and Roman Polanski would soon be on the run, leaving his adolescent lover in disarray. We had our brown limbs, our cut-offs and halter tops; we had our ice cream and lip gloss. Advice was in order, but Carol was too subtle for that. (Others were more direct: "Now everyone will want to screw you," remarked one of the grown-ups bracingly.)

Carol gave me a copy of "Lolita" instead of a sermon. And that is how I came to read it, in two rainy summer afternoons, when I was 12. And when I emerged tearfully from the bedroom, she just nodded and opened her arms, for I was a sensitive kid. "Poor, poor Humbert!" I cried. "Lolita was so mean!"

Carol's thinly plucked eyebrows shot up in surprise. This was not what she had had in mind. But never once had it occurred to me to see myself reflected in Lolita, who struck me as a mercenary and tough little chick. I knew girls like Lolita in school and I dreaded them. No, I identified with Humbert. Humbert the leathery lover, the tragicomedian, the storyteller -- I cast myself as the eloquent, heartbroken Hum. Though time has certainly altered my view of Humbert and his Lo, my tears still trickle with his. My love affair with Lolita is still going strong today.

There in my room, in my bed, behind my book and further still behind the rosy curtains of my eyes, deep new fields of introspection opened up. "Lolita" had all the otherworldly shimmer of "Alice in Wonderland." Like "Alice," it presented a topsy-turvy, kaleidoscopic world, one in which slender reeds of girls billowed to become huge and all-encompassing, and grown men reduced themselves to children. It was a realm where clumsy giants tried embarrassingly to get off with delicate fairies. These telescoping shifts in size and perspective were not unlike puberty itself. I felt nothing but cringing pity for galumphing Humbert, and sex between these two seemed pathetic, unimaginable. What on earth was he thinking? I was completely unpersuaded by Humbert's comparison of himself to some dark, broodingly handsome movie star of the '50s. (Was he Rock Hudson? Gregory Peck? Ridiculous.) This was beside the point anyway, since Hum was so irretrievably old. His re-entry into childhood is exceedingly strained. Even his most visceral image, that of a large hand trying to cram itself into a tiny glove, carries with its brutality the sad picture of a clodhopping oldster trying to be young, of mutton dressed as lamb, so heavy does Humbert's flesh hang on his bones.

I knew Lolita didn't really love him. What 12-year-old could? But through his eyes I fell hard for her, intuiting the long nights and days of unrequited passion that await every adolescent. Just as Lolita is to Humbert a portal onto lost childhood, Lolita was to me the threshold of a new world of emotion. Humbert is the unrequited lover par excellence, since the object of his love is beautiful insofar as it is distant. Even when she's in his arms, she's a lifetime away. Humbert's love is more than unrequited: It is unrequitable, and therein lies the sharp twanging ache of it. Pedophilia presents itself here as a peculiarly virulent, death-dealing strain of nostalgia. And there's no cure for it. We love the past, but it doesn't even know we exist.

N E X T+P A G E: We're all Humbert Humbert