Lolita, ya, Lolita!

This is so cool. :-))


Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets."


Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had.

Characters in Literature I Hate

Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word though there are a lot that I find quite tiresome, particularly the feckless Harold Skimpole in Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and just about everyone in George Bernard Shaw's overrated and bloodless plays.

But the one character who had the most negative impact on me was Uncle Tom. I used to wonder what black Americans meant when they used the term in such a disparaging way towards certain members of their community; I used to wonder, that is, until I opened the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin!

Yes, I know that Harriet Beecher Stowe intended him as a 'noble hero.' Yes, I know that he demonstrates a certain form of Christian resignation and acceptance, that would have been wholly understandable to a nineteenth century readership. Yes, I know that it was a message for the times. But when I reached such a stage of irritation with him, when I began to feel that he needed a 'damned good whipping' to rouse him from his dog-like torpor, then I simply knew I had to stop reading. To be put in the frame of mind of a slave owner in the Old South was far from being a comfortable experience! :))

Gatsby, Race and Cultural Pessimism

In The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald makes an oblique reference, in the character of Tom Buchanan, to the theories of Lothrop Stoddard on the decline of the white race. There is a background, in the fashion of Oswald Spengler, to this kind of cultural pessimism.

There is also, it might be said, wider concerns of sexual anxiety, fears at one and the same time of miscegenation and inadequacy. I'm thinking specifically here of Henry Champley, one time foreign editor of Le Temps, and his wonderfully eccentric White Women, Coloured Men, his bizarre and salacious travel book, published in 1936.

In this he urges white women to beware of the dark races; for his travels in the USA and the Far East have convinced him that The coloured people have discovered the White woman as an idol worthy of being desired above all else. The problem for Mr. Champley is that the white woman has also discovered the coloured races! She is therefore urged to resist the tempations of racial mixing and promiscuity in favour of 'heroic humility', which, I assume, means being at the disposal of dear old Mr. Champley! :-))

Actually this whole cultural trend has a wider resonance than Stoddard's specifically American concerns. It's already evident before the First World War, in work like The Conflict of Colour, where Putnam Weale warns his fellow Britons against the perils of the Japanese alliance. In the mid-1920s, independently of the American school, the poet Leo Chiozza Money published The Peril of the White, saying that The whites of Europe and elsewhere are set upon race suicide and internecine war.

Is it surprising, then, that Fitzgerald allows the ridiculous Buchanan to voice such views? Always remember Nick's thought in Gatsby I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. I dare say Tom and Mr Champley would have got on well, though. :-))

Fascist Literati

Céline is the first to leap to mind, though his 'Fascism' was anything but systematic; more a collection of petty personal grievances of one kind or another. Castle to Castle is not his best novel, but it gives much insight into the character of his politics. Ernst Jünger is one of those deliciously ambigious figures, though if you really want to discover his views on Fascism his Notebooks are worth examination.

There are some other good examples that should be added to the list, including Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Celine's countryman and fellow novelist, although he is now almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. From the Anglo-Saxon world we have Percy Wyndham Lewis, painter and author who co-founded the Vorticist movement in poetry. More of a 'fellow traveller' than an outright Fascist, he was, a little like Celine, one of those individuals who has to swim against the tide. His 1937 novel, Revenge for Love, is highly critical of Communist activity on the Spanish Civil War, and dismissive of the political enthusiasims of left-wing English intellectuals.

But the greatest of all the 'Fascist' writers is surely Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He later became a supporter of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi leader. After a war-time meeting with Josef Goebbels Hamsun sent him his Nobel Prize medal as a gift; and after Hitler's death in 1945 he wrote an obituary describing him as a "warrior for mankind." Even so, the work and the politics are two quite different things. Hunger, Pan, Victoria and Mysteries have a value well beyond the mundane.

Speaking of Drieu, I now have a copy of his 1931 novel, Le Feu Follet, translated into English as Will O' the Wisp. I'll record my impressions here in due course. I will say, though, that he is beginning to exercise a kind of spell over me. :-))

Loving The Devil’s Dictionary; Loving Ambrose Bierce

I’ve been leafing through my copy of the wonderful The Devil’s Dictionary, alighting on some favourite definitions. Here are a few;

Cat: a soft, indestructible automaton provided by Nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Love: a temporary insanity cured by marriage.

Philosophy: a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Religion: the daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Idiot: member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. :))

And what about me? Well, I like this;

Zeal: a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.

In general Ambrose Bierce is one of my favourite American writers, along with Mark Twain, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hewingway, Damon Runyon and Truman Capote. But there is something strangely unique about Bierce, something, it might even be said, of Faust himself. His wonderfully Gothic short stories reveal complexities and depth of meaning beyond ordinary eyes.

Where did he go, what happened to him in the end? Alas, we will never know. Perhaps the Devil simply claimed his own. :)