The Two Lolitas Read online

  THE TWO LOLITAS

  MICHAEL MAAR

  This paperback edition first published by Verso 2017

  First published by Verso 2005

  © Michael Maar 2005, 2017

  Introduction © Daniel Kehlmann 2017

  Translation © Perry Anderson 2005, 2017

  Appendix I translation © Will Hobson 2005, 2017

  Appendix II was first published in the German magazine Cicero, and later published in English

  by the Paris Review. We reproduce it here with thanks to that publication for permission.

  Appendix II translation © Daniel Kehlmann 2017

  Photographs of Nabokov on pages 15 and 47 © Vladimir Nabokov Estate

  Photograph of Nabokov on page 51 © Jochen Richter/Bayerisches Fernsehen

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors and translators have been asserted

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  Verso

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  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, 11201

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  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-184-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-185-5 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-186-2 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Maar, Michael, author. | Kehlmann, Daniel, 1975– translator, writer of preface, interviewer. | Anderson, Perry, translator. | Hobson, Will, translator of appendix. | Lichberg, Heinz von. Lolita. English. | Lichberg, Heinz von. Atomite. English.

  Title: The two Lolitas / Michael Maar.

  Other titles: Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant. English

  Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2017. | ‘Translation: Perry Anderson; translation of Appendix: Will Hobson’ – Verso title page. | A reissue of the 2005 Verso edition, with a new preface and an interview with Nabokov by Daniel Kehlmann. | Includes bibliographical references. | Originally published in German as Lolita und der deutsche Leutnant.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017015964 | ISBN 9781786631848 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977. Lolita. | Lichberg, Heinz von. Lolita. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading.

  Classification: LCC PS3527.A15 L633 2017 | DDC 813/.54–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015964

  Typeset in Perpetua by YHT Ltd, London

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays Ltd

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Daniel Kehlmann

  The Two Lolitas

  Supple Girls

  Lola’s Former Life

  Lolita as Demon; The Spanish Friend

  Little Lotte and the Führer

  Three Possibilities; Growing Danger

  Atomite and the Wizard of Os

  Notes

  Appendix I: Two stories by Heinz von Lichberg

  Lolita

  Atomite

  Appendix II: Who Wrote Lolita First? An Interview with Michael Maar

  Select Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION BY

  DANIEL KEHLMANN

  I confess that Michael Maar’s discovery about Lolita has become an obsession of mine. I’ve no solution to offer, and to be quite frank, I don’t even have a convincing theory; but at the same time I can’t accept that the riddle is unsolvable. Of course, for people uninterested in the labyrinthine art and adventurous life of Vladimir Nabokov, this doesn’t matter – but for a Nabokov-lover, Maar’s discovery is so astonishing that you would need to have firmly opted for ignorance to maintain it was unimportant.

  I won’t describe Maar’s impressive detective work here; you can read it for yourself in his own elegant prose. I’d just like to mention two things that are always brought up in connection with it. First of all, the whole business could of course be pure accident. In theory this wouldn’t be impossible. It could be accidental that two central characters in works by two writers unknown to one another are called Lolita; it could be pure chance that each is a landlady’s daughter, and it could likewise be by chance that both authors wrote stories in which an inventor presents a minister of war with a weapon of mass destruction, and introduced two closely related men called Waltz, a name which is not exactly common. In pure logic, there is nothing against this. But it is certainly improbable – so improbable that almost any other hypothesis is more likely. Besides, Maar discovered after the first publication of this book (there is a footnote on this in the new edition) that Lichberg was related to Nabokov’s Berlin landlady – a woman whose family is still mentioned in Nabokov’s letters to his wife Véra years after he moved from the house. And so, to put it very cautiously, it is at least not absurd to assume there is a causal connection.

  Secondly, wherever this causal connection may lie, it has nothing to do with plagiarism. This should go without saying, but still needs to be stated loud and clear. When Maar published his discovery for the first time, newspapers across the world reported ‘accusations of cribbing’ against Vladimir Nabokov. As was only to be expected, a few Nabokov experts felt themselves moved by a kind of reflex to defend the great man against an accusation that no one had actually made – most of them simply saying that Lolita was after all a common name, and failing to mention the many other coincidences: ‘Nabokov family rejects plagiarism claim’ was a headline in the Guardian in April 2004. When in April 2016, in an interview for the online edition of the Paris Review, I asked Michael Maar, ‘Is this about plagiarism?’ he answered, ‘Of course not.’ And yet more than one literary magazine referred to this discussion, reprinted here as Appendix II, with the outcry that a German literary critic was raising accusations of plagiarism against Nabokov. It seems as if the concept ‘plagiarism’ is so strong that it overrides any logical operator, any qualification, even a clear denial.

  Superfluous as this is, it must therefore be restated: What Maar discovered not only has nothing to do with plagiarism, but is its very opposite. If I name a character in a novel ‘Leopold Bloom’, I am not plagiarizing James Joyce’s Ulysses: I am deliberately referencing it. Had Nabokov simply been inspired by the (bad) novelist Lichberg, it would have been easy for him to cover his tracks. But given an essential aspect of the concordance lies precisely in the characters’ names, we have by definition not theft but rather deliberate indication.

  But for whom is this indication designed? And why? Neither in personal nor artistic terms do we find anything about Lichberg that might have influenced or even interested the uncompromising master Nabokov. What is it we are overlooking, then? What is there that we don’t know? A reference is an act of communication, but with whom was Nabokov communicating here, given that Lichberg had long been dead when Lolita was published, and his book had been out of print for years? Communication with spirits may well be an important theme in Nabokov, but here we would be in the realm of pure speculation.

  And if we simply shrug our shoulders and say: ‘I don’t care!’? The urge to do so would certainly be understandable. If a similar question had arisen with Hemingway or Hamsun, it would indeed have been a matter of indifference; but Nabokov is precisely the key author of the cipher, the grand master of reference, the very one out of all novelists of classic modernity who signals most tirelessly to the reader that in his work every detail is important and needs deciphering.

  And so we are supposed to solve the mystery; Nabokov himself schooled us to do so with his understanding of literary works as highly complex puzzles. What then are we to do? We can at least, while awaiting new discoveries and new
detectives, read Michael Maar’s book and bear the confusion it arouses in us with stoical curiosity.

  THE TWO LOLITAS

  After the phone call came through, the publisher climbed on to the table. An anonymous friend inside the Home Office had rung with the news: the government had decided against prosecution. No one responsible for the novel to be published the next day would go to jail. The three hundred guests invited to the Ritz were jubilant.

  For a month, a copy of the scandalous work had been under examination by the Director of Public Prosecutions; twenty thousand copies were waiting in bookshops, to be either sold out or quietly pulped. The charge hanging over the publisher was dissemination of an immoral work. In the House of Commons, the Attorney-General had warned Nigel Nicolson that publication of it could land him behind bars. The author’s wife joked that her husband would spend Christmas either in Italy or at the Old Bailey.

  The party held in London on 5 November 1959 was a climactic moment in the career of a novel that would turn the life of its author upside-down. Five American houses had rejected the manuscript, and urgently advised him against publication. The French publisher who eventually accepted the book specialized in erotica, trading in titles like Tender Thighs and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Graham Greene, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955, was the first to notify the world that the two green volumes released by Olympia Press were great literature. On that November evening four years later, even the British government certified that the book in question was not pornography, but art. Thereafter the triumphal march of the novel was not to be halted. The cheers that went up when Nigel Nicolson clambered on to the table and announced the news could be heard blocks away.1

  This part of the story is well-known. The following, unknown part has elements of the fantastic about it – indeed, may sound like a tall tale. Yet no overinventive author but rather life itself is responsible for its volutes and arabesques. It is a true story, and we will begin with its end.

  Eight years before the big party in London, the local paper in Lübeck announced that one of its contributors had passed away:

  Last Wednesday, after a short illness, our colleague and collaborator Heinz von Eschwege-Lichberg died. The pen has finally fallen from the hands of one of the best-known personalities in German journalism.2

  The condolences of the editorialist were only slightly overstated at the time. Today the fame of the deceased has faded, to put it mildly: until recently, Herr von Eschwege was completely forgotten. He is not to be found in any directory of writers, there is scarcely a trace of him in any literary archive, and the only work of biographical reference that mentions him shortens his life by twenty years.3 That is forgivable, because a kind of twilight hovers around his very name. As a writer he called himself Heinz von Lichberg.4 He was born, however, Heinz von Eschwege. His family background, an ancient line of Hessian aristocrats, was more military than literary. Although his father was a colonel in the infantry,5 the son took to poetry early on. As a youth Heinz von Lichberg was already placing poems in Jugend and Simplicissimus. In the middle of the First World War, while serving as a lieutenant in the Naval Artillery reserve, he published a collection of fifteen tales, under the title The Accursed Gioconda, which appeared in 1916 under the imprint of Falken-Verlag in Darmstadt. Other short books followed.6 After the war, however, Lichberg mainly devoted himself to journalism, working in Berlin for the newspapers of Scherl-Verlag, the nucleus of the later Hugenberg empire. He became popular in 1929, when he flew as a reporter for Scherl-Verlag on the transatlantic voyage of the Graf Zeppelin; his account of this journey, still obtainable in second-hand bookshops today, was successfully marketed to a proud nation under the title Zeppelin Goes Round the World. On this trip Heinz von Lichberg saw New York – over a decade before Vladimir Nabokov.

  Tradition has it that the latter came within an inch of committing a historic folly. In the afterword to the novel that made him world-famous and financially independent, Nabokov writes that he was often tempted to destroy the work in gestation:

  Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.7

  Juanita Dark was the name Nabokov had then assigned his young heroine. What would have happened if Véra had not restrained her husband from destroying the dangerous bundle of papers? Nabokov would have died a professor of literature and a ‘writer’s writer’. Google would not spit out millions of entries under a single term. Lolita, Texas, would not have considered applying to change its name. Lolita would not have risen from name to concept.8 The literature of the twentieth century would have lost one of its most audacious works. And yet there would have been a printed Lolita in the world.9

  SUPPLE GIRLS

  A cultivated man of middle age recounts the story of his coup de foudre. It all starts when, travelling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is very young, but her charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her tender age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator – marked by her for ever – remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: ‘Lolita.’ It is the ninth of the fifteen tales in the collection The Accursed Gioconda, and it appeared forty years before its famous homonym.10

  On reading it today and comparing it with the novel which fortunately was not burnt, a slight feeling of unreality and déjàvu comes over us – as if we had entered one of the labyrinthine stories of Borges. The core of the tale depicts a journey to Spain. The anonymous first-person narrator sets off from South Germany, after bidding farewell to a pair of elderly brothers who own a tavern that he frequents. For reasons that remain unclear, they react strangely to the announcement of his trip. The narrator travels through Paris and Madrid to Alicante, where he takes lodgings in a pension by the sea. He plans no more than a quiet holiday. But then, after a brief delay, comes that first fatal glance, which cannot but remind us of the later Lolita. There the first-person narrator, Humbert Humbert, makes a journey with the intention of finding a quiet place to work near a lake – surrogate of an Ur-scene by sea. In the little town of Ramsdale he calls on the landlady, Charlotte Haze, whom he finds as unattractive as her residence. Inwardly resolved to leave, he follows Mrs Haze as she conducts him through it:

  I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery – ‘the piazza’, sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.

  It was the same child – the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple back, the same chestnut head of hair.11

  This one glance is enough, and Humbert Humbert stays. So too for Lichberg’s first-person narrator, just as the beauty of his young girl also has a dark underside in a mystery of the past:

  ‘The friendly, talkative landlord gave me a room with a wonderful view of the sea, and nothing stood in the way of my enjoying some weeks of undisturbed beauty.

  ‘Until, on the second day, I saw Lolita, Severo’s daughter.

  ‘By our northern standards she was terribly young, with veiled southern eyes and hair of an unusual reddish gold. Her body was boyishly slim and supple, and her voice full and dark. But there was something more than her beauty that attracted me – there was a strange mystery about her that often troubled me on those moonlit nights.’

  Like Humbert, our narrator is immediately bewitched, and abandons any thought of departure. His Lolita too, like Dolores Haze later, is subject to violent changes of mood. Does she want something from him or not; is she hiding secrets in her child’s breast? As in the case of the agreeably surprised Humbert Humbert, i
t is eventually Lolita who seduces the narrator, not the other way round. The author does not say so outright (we are still in the Kaiserreich), but his ellipses and circumlocutions leave the reader in little doubt of the amorous realities:

  ‘There were days when Lolita’s big shy eyes regarded me with an unspoken question, and there were evenings when I saw her burst into sudden uncontrollable sobs.

  ‘I had ceased to think of travelling on. I was entranced by the South – and Lolita. Golden hot days and silvery melancholy nights.

  ‘And then came the evening of unforgettable reality and dreamlike magic as Lolita sat on my balcony and sang softly, as she often did. But this time she came to me with halting steps on the landing, the guitar discarded precipitously on the floor. And while her eyes sought out the image of the flickering moon in the water, like a pleading child she flung her trembling little arms around my neck, leant her head on my chest, and began sobbing. There were tears in her eyes, but her sweet mouth was laughing. The miracle had happened. “You are so strong,” she whispered.

  ‘Days and nights came and went …’

  That is both as inexplicit, and as unambiguous, as befits the period. The days and nights devoted by a lover to the sweet mouth of a lovely nymphet became sexually indecent only with Nabokov, who at first thought of publishing his manuscript anonymously, and later only just escaped the Old Bailey. The correspondence of core plot, narrative perspective, choice of name and title is none the less striking. Unfortunately, as Van Veen remarks in Ada, there is no logical law that would tell us when a given number of coincidences ceases to be accidental.12 In its absence, it is not easy to answer – but, of course, even more difficult to dismiss – the unavoidable question: can Vladimir Nabokov, the author of an imperishable Lolita, the proud black swan of modern fiction, have known of the ugly duckling that was its precursor? Could he have been affected by it?