'She Flung It on the Fire'

A reader informs me that Vladimir Nabokov was a “misogynist and pedophile,” and that Lolita ought to be banned as “kiddie porn.” The novelist heard similar allegations and demands during his lifetime and responded, if at all, with a mingling of outrage and disgust. He once described Humbert Humbert as “a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’” To his creator, Humbert is never less than a monster without morals, a calculating sociopath who charms inattentive readers. More than sixty-five years after its first publication, readers are still misreading Lolita. 

Admiration for Nabokov, my anonymous reader suggests, is a case of aiding and abetting the commission of a criminal act. That’s a first for me – love for a writer’s work turned into a felony. I will never understand readers (or non-readers, more likely) who wish to police their fellow readers. The enjoyment of good books is rooted in an exhilarating sense of imaginative freedom. My reader’s sour temperament and casual authoritarianism remind me of a passage in Cicely Greig's Ivy Compton-Burnett: a Memoir (Garnstone Press, 1972). Greig was Compton-Burnett’s typist and friend for the last twenty-three years of her life. She describes the time the novelist found a peppermint cream among her chocolates:

 

“Ivy peered at the thing, as at an unidentifiable object, something she had never seen before, turning it this way and that, her expression blank with bewilderment. What was it doing there, the vulgar thing? After a full minute of concentrated examination she flung it on the fire.”