How ‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/lolita-obscenity-cancel-culture-emily-mortimer.html

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My father, John Mortimer, brought me up to believe that you can be a good person and kill someone and a perfectly awful person who never gets so much as a parking ticket your whole life. It’s an education I’m proud of. He was an author and a criminal defense barrister — in his words, “the only playwright ever to have defended a murderer in the central criminal court at the Old Bailey” — and his prowess in both professions rode on his ability to see past easy morality and to respect the fact that the truth is never one-sided and therefore art should not be, either.

My father defended a lot of murderers — his favorite clients, because he said they had generally got rid of the one person on earth who was really bugging them, and a kind of peace had descended over them — but his other specialty was obscenity. He was of the “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” school of thinking. He became well known in the field for championing such works as the Sex Pistols’ album “Never Mind the Bollocks” (charged with public indecency), Oz magazine’s schoolkid edition (featuring a centerfold of the beloved cartoon character Rupert the Bear with an enormous erection) and Hubert Selby Jr.’s transgressive novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” All were prosecuted in England, and all but the Sex Pistols under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.

My dad, who died in 2009, is with me every day somehow or another — in the funny things my kids come out with, in my conversations with my mother, in wondering what he would have had to say about this or that. But there was a period a few years ago when I found myself thinking about him a good deal more than usual. I was publicizing a film called “The Bookshop.” The film was directed by the Catalan filmmaker Isabel Coixet, who had adapted it from Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel. It takes place in the year 1959 and tells the story of Florence Green, a lonely widow (played by me) who decides to open a bookshop in a little coastal town in the west of England.

The film was released in 2017 during the first wave of the #MeToo movement, which was a fitting moment for the story — being about a quietly heroic single woman in her middle age who comes up against the powers that be (mostly men) in her bid both to run a small business and to arrive at some sort of self-realization. But an interesting subplot in both the novel and the movie came up a good deal in the conversations I was having with journalists. The year 1959 was when “Lolita” was published in England, and Florence Green is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to sell the novel in her shop. In every interview I was asked by journalists what I thought about “Lolita” as a work of fiction and whether I thought it publishable today. I thought about my father and about a time when fiction was still considered dangerous enough to prosecute. I thought about the fact that “Lolita” had escaped the absurd gaze of the obscenity law. I wondered if indeed the novel might have an even more difficult time getting published now than it did in the 1950s, and I wished my dad were still alive to talk to about it all.

I’d read “Lolita” in college, and I was too lazy to bother to read it again when preparing for my part in “The Bookshop.” I was already a huge fan of Nabokov’s — I had bought copies of his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” in bulk to hand out to my friends at college, and I had worn thin his “Lectures on Russian Literature,” which are as withering as they are brilliant. (I’ll never forget my shocked delight at his excoriation of Dostoyevsky as “a mediocre writer with wastelands of literary platitudes.”)

But I’d been talking so knowledgeably about “Lolita” to the press that I was overcome with a kind of sheepish compulsion to read it again, after the fact. I bought a copy and I read it, and I realized as I did that I had absolutely and for certain never read it before. I can’t have done. Any expertise I’d claimed to have on the subject of “Lolita” was invented. All I knew must have come only from SparkNotes, plot summaries and crib sheets, and maybe from watching the movie. Because if I had ever read “Lolita,” I would have certainly remembered the experience. I wouldn’t have been so shocked and scandalized, my breath wouldn’t have been so taken away, my brain and heart and soul wouldn’t have been so twisted and fried and made to feel so sad, so upset, so elated and so blown apart all at once.

It opens so thrillingly, and you jump straight into its strange and beautiful depths with full abandon and excitement: “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.” You’re hooked and it’s stunning and you still think at this stage that you’ve maybe read it before, and in any case, whatever, you’re completely in.

Part of the charm of those first pages, as Caitlin Flanagan has noted in The Atlantic, is that they introduce Humbert as a winsome and sensitively tuned boy, a child himself. “But then,” Flanagan writes, “just a few pages later, he is an adult who is — what the hell? — cursed to live in ‘a civilization which allows a man of 25 to court a girl of 16 but not a girl of 12.’ One had heard certain things about ‘Lolita’ — but 12?” Flanagan continues: “Here was Humbert extolling ‘certain East Indian provinces’ where men of 80 ‘copulate with girls of 8, and nobody minds.’ And here he was on his habit of seeking out very young girls wherever he could find them, in orphanages and reform schools and public places: ‘Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.’”

To this I would add: And here was Humbert fantasizing about a future in which he marries Lolita, and has her child and rapes her, too: “I might eventually have her produce a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be 8 or 9 around 1960 when I would still be dans la force de l’âge” — and then, what’s this, now he’s imagining a third generation of abuse with his granddaughter?!

As I read all this and thought about all the things I’d been pontificating about to the press, I started to wonder how on earth “Lolita” had managed to get published then without ever having to endure the indignity of prosecution. Why had “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” been prosecuted in 1960, but not “Lolita” the year before? That’s not to say its journey was plain sailing. It had been initially rejected by all the big publishing houses in the United States, so Nabokov resorted to the pornographic French publisher Olympia Press, only to have it banned in France and also in Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In England, all copies were seized by customs from 1955 until 1959, when it was finally published to huge consternation and controversy. But, to my knowledge, no criminal case was ever brought against “Lolita,” which is surprising given that it appeared in the world at a time when literature was far from safe from the clutches of the obscenity laws, and given that it’s still the most shocking, sensational thing you’ve ever read.

So many questions ran through my head as I read on. I wanted to call people up and ask them if they’d ever actually read “Lolita”? I wanted to tell them to immediately do so. Just to be able to talk about it. To hear what they thought. For lack of obliging friends, I turned to Google. It wasn’t just me concerning myself with the question of whether “Lolita” would find a publisher today. Dan Franklin, who published Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie at Jonathan Cape, has speculated on the subject too: “I wouldn’t publish ‘Lolita.’ What’s different today is #MeToo and social media — you can organize outrage at the drop of a hat. If ‘Lolita’ was offered to me today, I’d never be able to get it past the acquisition team — a committee of 30-year-olds, who’d say, ‘If you publish this book we will all resign.’” Laura Waddell, a millennial and a publisher, retorted in The Guardian: “The true publication history of ‘Lolita’ is so much more interesting than boring, bad-faith millennial bashing. To claim that it would never be published now is a red herring.” I thought about this and I realized that in actual fact, given its almost absurdly shocking content, “Lolita” has been relatively gently treated in recent years, too.

You can’t help wondering why the same court of public opinion that has all but canceled artists like Balthus and Picasso has spared “Lolita.” At a time when even a painting of a female nude is talked about as a potentially offensive political statement, how has the novel managed to avoid a searing reassessment? In fact, women have always and continue to be some of its noisiest defenders. From Dorothy Parker (“‘Lolita’ is a fine book, a distinguished book — all right then — a great book”) to Lena Dunham (who says it’s her “favorite book”), “Lolita” has spellbound women as much as men. This is a feat, given it’s the ultimate example of the unreconstructed “male gaze” — a middle-aged man’s obsessive account of an underage girl whom he does nothing but sexualize, objectify and rape from the first page to the last.

My father wrote about the “Last Exit to Brooklyn” trial: “I remember standing in front of three very intelligent Lords of Appeal. I was trying to describe the writer’s position. I told them it was impossible to be a writer and be told there are some areas of life which you are not allowed to write about. To the judges this came as an entirely new idea, even though it is a total cliché to anyone who works in literature. The general view of the court seemed to be that if Shakespeare wrote Lady Macbeth that meant Shakespeare was in favor of murdering the houseguests. They found it impossible to separate the author from the subject with which he was dealing.”

In some ways I think it is much easier to separate the writer from his subject in the case of Nabokov and “Lolita” than it is to separate Picasso, say, from his paintings or Woody Allen from his films or Balthus from his little girls. Nabokov was a happily married man who admired and adored his wife, Véra, and lived an exemplary life as an academic and author. By all accounts his only extramarital dalliances were with buxom middle-aged women. If Nabokov had ever had dark, venal thoughts like those of Humbert Humbert’s, they remained thoughts, or words on a page.

But I think there are other reasons “Lolita” has endured, despite being more shocking than many pornographic novels of its time and despite the reappraisal that many other transgressive works of art have gone through in our time. First, it’s very funny. My dad always said you could get away with anything in court as long as you made people laugh: “In obscenity cases the first thing I did was to make the jury laugh. The great object of the judge and the prosecutor was to stop the jury from laughing.” Humbert Humbert is hilariously self-aware and funny. Even in extremis, even at the height of the drama when he is out for blood and on the road to ruin (when a lesser author would have forced his hero into earnestness), our hero is still cracking jokes and making us laugh.

The novel is also written in brilliant prose. Nabokov himself claimed that this book was a record of his “love affair with the English language,” and the feeling is of language being used as it has never been used before and might never be again. You read about awful things in vertiginous, sensational sentences that take your breath away. As Humbert confesses, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Murderers were my father’s favorite clients, not just because they were the most obliging and compliant. He also considered murder to be the most human of crimes, the one crime any one of us could commit. We might not rob a bank, we might not sell drugs or fiddle our taxes, but he thought that all of us when pushed could just about find it in ourselves to kill. I think he said these things in part to shock. As a writer and a renegade, he was interested in paradoxes, but he also really believed in finding the good in people, and in the simple notion that “there but for the grace of God go I.” What my father did both as a criminal defense barrister and as a writer was to try to persuade a jury or a reader to find it in themselves to empathize with the character he was presenting — no matter the circumstances.

It’s impossible to retreat to any kind of moral high ground when you read “Lolita” — partly because Nabokov threads a strange emotional honesty and purity through his portrait of obsession. Because as well as all the other things the book is, “Lolita” is one of the most beautiful love stories you’ll ever read. You finally understand this in its last, thrilling, devastating, tragic section. From Humbert’s final rejection by Lolita (thank God), his breaking down in his car as he drives away for the last time, “the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears,” to his desperate incantations: “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable, and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!” to the moment he is apprehended by the police and remembers hearing the sounds of children playing when Lolita first disappeared: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope … I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” Humbert’s pain is palpable and so deeply relatable. The agony of lost, impossible love, the feeling of having defiled something innocent because you loved — it’s all too familiar. The most thrilling, beautiful and disturbing aspect of the novel is that as well as finding Humbert’s heart on the page, we also find, like it or not, a bit of our own.

“Lolita” makes us see with the eyes of a man who is a pedophile, a rapist and a murderer, and that’s I think the essential reason it’s escaped the harsher accusations of both the courts and the moral police in the 60 years since it’s been published. While it doesn’t apologize for Humbert’s vile transgressions, neither does it romanticize them — although Humbert himself is ridiculously romantic at times. The author forces his reader to confront, on every page, the monstrous nature of his protagonist. There is no escaping his awfulness, but we get inside his head and his heart. We end up not only empathizing with but also loving a murderer and the rapist of a young girl. And it feels really good. It feels like a deep relief. It feels exhilarating and paradoxically cleansing. Nabokov called “Lolita” the “purest” of all his books.

My father could never have got Humbert off in a court of law, but he would have argued fiercely for his humanity, just as he argued for the humanity of all of the most dangerous and immoral people he defended. Unlike many lesser works of fiction, some of which my father found himself advocating for, “Lolita” has been protected by “the refuge of art,” where it should be forever safe to explore the thoughts and feelings of people capable of the most monstrous things. “Lolita” remains unassailable because it disarms you and transcends judgment. The experience of reading it, if you do actually read it, is to relinquish concern with right and wrong and just to feel things as another person feels them. One of our most precious attributes, and perhaps the greatest measure of our humanity, is our ability to do this. Florence Green in her little bookshop understood it, my dad knew it, Nabokov did, and really anyone who is a reader knows it, too.