Lolita

had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
    My task proved simpler than either
of
us had anticipated. Save for the correction
of
obvious solecisms and a careful suppression
of
a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.”’s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative
of
places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and,
of
course, this mask—through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow—had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber
of
the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H.H.”’s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September–October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to remain a complete mystery, had not this memoir been permitted to come under my reading lamp.
    For the benefit
of
old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies
of
the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,”
of
“Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow
of
this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor
of a
hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers
of
the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
    Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means
of
platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array
of
four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here.
If
, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type
of
mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication
of
“Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse
of
a sensuous existence
of
their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development
of
a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H.”’s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12%
of
American adult males—a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer
of
1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
    This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual; and a great work
of
art is
of
course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.”
No
doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example
of
moral leprosy, a mixture
of
ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many
of
his casual opinions on the people and scenery
of
this country are