Starting The Enchanter, with thoughts on all the Lolitas

1/ Officially I’m reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, but I was at Waterstones yesterday and also started reading Vladimir Nabokov’s The Enchanter. 
It has a handless watch (there’s a handless clock in my film), and the word “octopus”, so that must be a sign. 

2/ The Enchanter is the proto-Lolita. It was written in Russian in 1938, assumed lost, then found, but not translated into English and published until 1986, after Nabokov’s death. 
Here is the plot: “The unnamed protagonists of The Enchanter are a French jeweler of about 40, an almost faceless girl of 12 with whom he falls in love when he sees her roller-skating in a park, and her unpleasant, hypochondriac mother, whom the jeweler marries in the hope of getting his hands on the daughter.” 
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1986/12/14/nabokovs-life-and-lolitas-death/86f78ff6-8163-476d-906b-bdff2014c707/?utm_term=.4f040a20e8c5) 
Lolita was published in 1955. 

3/ The Enchanter, however, is not where it began. It was The Gift.  
I don’t understand why I forgot to write about it on my blog, so it took me some time to find it. 
From chapter 3 of The Gift—we are hearing Boris Ivanovich (Zina’s stepfather): 

“Ah, if only I had a tick or 2, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. 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—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the 3 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? That story, you see, happened to a friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul.” 

Isn’t that so familiar? 
(Except that it didn’t happen to a friend of his—Boris Ivanovich is talking about himself, he married his wife to get access to her daughter Zina). 
The Gift was Nabokov’s last published novel in Russian, and written between 1935 and 1937, hence before The Enchanter. 
That plot goes a long way, showing that Nabokov was obsessed with it and wanted to write it for a long time. 

4/ You might have heard of The Two Lolitas, in which Michael Marr argues that Nabokov might have plagiarised from Heinz von Lichberg’s 1916 short story “Lolita”, or suffered from cryptomnesia. 
As I have written before, I have read the short story, and it’s nothing like Nabokov’s novel, except a few similarities that are incidental. Any comparison is forced and ridiculous. There is no resemblance thematically or stylistically—even the plot and genre are different. 


5/ However, it is very likely that the inspiration for Lolita was the real-life kidnap of Florence Sally Horner by Frank La Salle in 1948. 
The case is explicitly referenced in Nabokov’s book: 

“Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” 

This was the subject of a book published last year, The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman. 
Personally I think that the story of a paedophile who marries some poor woman in order to get access to her prepubescent daughter is a subject that interested Nabokov for a long time, but it was only when he knew about the case of Sally Horner that he got the inspiration for an abduction, and created his masterpiece Lolita. 
I wanted to read The Real Lolita, and once read an excerpt. However, after reading some reviews, I’ve changed my mind. 
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/03/the-real-lolita-vladimir-nabokov-child-abuse-ficton-red-flag-sally-horner-sarah-weinman?fbclid=IwAR3knFk7RXrOCWGH8zmt-XpNeqsWQSw_eeUkIKUeuXJAeMhbRSk_FnyNKsA
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-salacious-non-mystery-of-the-real-lolita

“Part of Weinman’s project is also to substantiate the charge that Nabokov “pilfered” more from the Horner tragedy than he’d care to admit. This is apparently a sting worthy of “To Catch a Predator.” She believes that Nabokov, the verbal seducer, wronged Horner with the publication of “Lolita,” his most famous novel, in 1955. He obscured the extent to which he “strip-mined” her story; he flattened her into a temptress. In reclaiming the biography of Sally Horner, giving her “precedence” and centrality, Weinman writes, she will “reveal the truth behind the curtain of fiction” and allow the captive to emerge “like the butterflies that Vladimir Nabokov so loved . . . ready to fly free.” Put more prosaically, “The Real Lolita”—which has won a flurry of advance praise—hopes to transcend its essential salaciousness and its warmed-over genre clichés by appealing to something resembling restorative justice. But the nets are empty, and the butterflies are already dead.
[…] There’s something alluring, and maybe too neat, about concretizing the novel’s “crimes” against taste and decency with a literal true-crime story. It’s as if the insolent loveliness of the writing—and, by extension, all writing—obscures the truth of Sally’s pain and trauma, and thereby is a betrayal of Sally and all victims of sexual abuse. But Weinman’s stance also seems fundamentally anti-fiction. She appears to resent “Lolita” for depicting cruelty with charm, allusive style, and psychological acuity—for being beautiful, when its subject matter is not. This is an unsophisticated criticism, and Weinman tries to disguise it, by making the act of novel-writing an actual crime, and Nabokov a villain who trapped a girl in a book.” 

This is utter nonsense. Humbert Humbert and Frank La Salle have nothing in common except their paedophilia. La Salle has none of the character’s intellect and wit. Lolita is a work of art, a trap, and a test. Nabokov might have taken inspiration from the real case, and chosen an approach that make (certain) readers uncomfortable—not only narrating from the perspective of a cruel and manipulative but intellectual and charming paedophile, but also describing the child as sexually precocious, but his stance is absolutely clear—Dolly (Lolita) is a poor victim, and Humbert Humbert is a manipulator, criminal, and rapist. He by no means glorifies nor defends Humbert Humbert’s crimes, even whilst the narrator tries to get some sympathy. The prose is beautiful indeed, but the ugliness is still there, and Dolly’s pain is in the text, if people just read carefully. 
When I call Lolita a trap, and a test, I mean just that—Lolita is a trap because careless readers easily fall for Humbert Humbert’s charm and not read between the lines to notice Dolly’s pain and trauma; it is a test because someone’s response to the book says a lot about them as a reader, and in some way, as a person. 
Katy Waldman of The New Yorker ends her article: 

“The phrase “The Real Lolita” implies its opposite: a sham “Lolita,” a prop, a lie, a fiction. But this book presents no evidence that Nabokov exploited Sally Horner to breathe life into his imaginings. What it insinuates, powerfully, is that Weinman has exploited both Sally and Nabokov to justify her prurient interest in yet another sad, dead girl.” 

6/ Speaking of real cases, I watched Abducted in Plain Sight a few months ago. 

“It chronicles the peculiar kidnapping case of Jan Broberg, an Idaho teenager who was abducted by her decades-older neighbor Robert Berchtold in the 1970s. But Berchtold—known as “B”—did not just kidnap Broberg once; he entrapped Jan’s religious parents in such a web of trust, shame, and complicity that he managed to convince the family to drop the most serious kidnapping charges against him, continue letting him spend disturbing amounts of time with their young daughter, and—in the most shocking twist of all—he eventually kidnapped her a second time.” 

(https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/02/abducted-in-plain-sight-netflix-jan-broberg)
I will not go into details of the case, because I could talk about it for 4 hours. Abducted in Plain Sight is the most frustrating documentary I have ever watched, and that is the common response of everyone who has seen it, as you can easily see on the internet. 
The reason I bring it up in this blog post is because: a, Robert Berchtold was a paedophile and a master manipulator; b, there was abduction (Jan was 12 when she was kidnapped the 1st time, and 14 the 2nd time); and c, for whatever reasons, he called her Dolly even though her name was Jan. 
I can’t find anything, but is there any chance Robert Berchtold might have read Nabokov’s novel and got some ideas? 

7/ Now, to go back to The Enchanter, Simon Karlinsky writes:  

“… any comparison of The Enchanter with Lolita is bound to be invidious. Humbert Humbert, Charlotte Haze and Lolita herself were delineated in vivid, unforgettable detail. Their earlier French counterparts were barely traced and not particularly interesting to begin with. The enjoyment of reading The Enchanter is comparable to the one afforded by studying Beethoven's published sketchbooks: seeing the murky and unpromising material out of which the writer and the composer were later able to fashion an incandescent masterpiece.” 

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1986/12/14/nabokovs-life-and-lolitas-death/86f78ff6-8163-476d-906b-bdff2014c707/?utm_term=.4f040a20e8c5)
I suppose I should keep that in mind. 
My impression right now is that the story doesn’t work so well when it has a 3rd-person narrator, and the unnamed man in The Enchanter doesn’t have Humbert Humbert’s sophistication. All the descriptions, from his point of view as he watches the girl, seem rather crude, revoltingly crude.