Tales Of First Love, Innocence, And Obsession - Nabokov, Lolita, And Everyone Else

Coleman Silk, the main character in Phillip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, is having an affair with a much younger woman - an uneducated, barely literate woman with a psychopathic, stalking ex-husband. Coleman's friend warns him and says the relationship can only end badly. At best he will end up disappointed, at worst dead at the hands of the husband. 

Coleman pauses, looks at his friend and says, 'Granted, she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

All three loves recalled are unforgettable. Everyone remembers their first love, an adolescent, unformed, but irresistible passion. No one can forget their best love - we replay the tape over and over again in our minds; and those who discover love much later in life and find in a December-May affair a satisfaction they never knew they had lost, lead a charmed life.  

Of all three it is the first, young love which is most indelible, the one by which all other loves are measured, an ultimate love ironically experienced at the very beginning. 

Vladimir Nabokov describes this profound yet limiting love in Lolita. There can be no love more pure and absolute than that within the embrace of innocence, he says, a love before either child even knows what it means or is supposed to mean and therefore of a virginal purity, 'a divine sublimity'.  Yet that love necessarily confines one within endless comparisons. 

Here speaking of Annabel, Humbert says:

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.

 After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief

Humbert instinctively knew then that his childhood friendship with her was special, irreplaceable, and unforgettable.  How could he not then compare her with every other woman he met? He had known Annabel in an impossibly unique time and place.

When he meets Lolita, time collapses - she is Annabel and first love can be rediscovered and relived:

It was the same child - the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.

And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.

With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts -that last mad immortal day behind the 'Roches roses.' The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

Time is what Humbert sought to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Obsession has a life of its own: the object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.

Humbert is fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate because he discovered love and innocence - romantic perfection - and unfortunate because no experience could ever match up to the purity, the beauty, and the almost spiritual essence of that first love. 

An unpublished story on the nature of innocence, and the foundational value it has to love, restates the theme:

Nancy Bell pulled her dress up over her head and stood naked as the water droplets from the ferns dripped onto her face and arms.  “They are my jewels”, she said to Henry Halter, “and one day you can buy me real ones.”

It was cool and dark in the woods behind his house.  Once when he was little he got lost in the woods and thought he would never find his way out. There were bears and wolves, and he might wander for days without finding his way home. 

For years he never set foot in the woods until Nancy Bell had asked him.  He knew that the wild animals were not real, but he still hesitated at the mountain laurel bushes at the back of their yard, and never took the narrow path into the woods. That was how childhood worked, he later thought, full of crazy imaginary things that scared you, and one day you woke up and they weren’t there anymore, and the woods was just a dark, wet place where you would prefer not to go.

Nancy Bell sat next to him in school the next day, so close together in the auditorium that their legs touched.  She smelled fresh and clean, like talcum powder and lilac soap, and she was wearing the same dress that she had worn in the woods.  He noticed a bit of dried oak leaf on her dress that she had not seen and remembered how she had put her clothes neatly in a pile on a mossy patch under his father’s favorite tree.

In June before the mosquitoes started biting, they sat naked in the woods and told stories to each other.  Nancy made up the rules and said that no story could be about their parents or brothers and sisters. “Make them up”, she said. “Make everything up”, and so each afternoon before the mosquitoes hatched from the wet oak leaves and puddles where the rain sluiced down the tallest trees and collected beneath them, they invented places where there were no people but people-animals.

 “Your house has disappeared”, Nancy said, “and so has mine. All we can see is the trees and the squirrels. I have made everything outside the woods disappear.”

Henry compared every woman he met with Nancy Bell; and they never measured up.  They were too matter-of-fact or too determined; too focused or too deliberate and precise.  None had Nancy’s ability to change things to suit her or to make things go away. Henry was never fully aware that she was doing this to him, making his choices for him; and when he once considered it, he laughed. They were only children, after all, and one summer with Nancy Bell was nothing. So what was it, then?

Nabokov believed that the past was far more than a part of a time-space continuum, but the most important one.  The present is a chimera, he said, imagined milliseconds of ‘reality’, bounded by the possibility of the future and the long, defining, significance of what went before.  

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for

We are not just determined by the past.  We are the past. First loves are never lost.

Is the obsession worth the frustration? The endless comparisons, the repeated failures to measure up? A moot question.   A love for Annabel or Nancy Bell is ineradicable, as present now as it was then, as determinant and inescapable as ever. 

Humbert did not exchange Annabel for Lolita - they were one and the same.  Henry Halter might never find another Nancy Bell, but if he did, the two would be as indistinguishable.  First loves are permanent. 

Hippie Tales - How Age Has A Way Of Straightening Bent Ideals

Anderson Phelps graduated from Columbia in the halcyon years of student protest.  Mark Rudd had led an insurrection, ousted the president of the university, and set the course for more insistent demands for social justice.  The university remained shuttered for weeks, the New York police had to be called in, and Rudd was carted off in handcuffs as a conquering hero. 

Graduation was uncertain because of the troubles - it took many weeks for the campus to quiet down and for classes to resume, but school administrators were simply glad to be rid of the miscreants who had ruined a perfectly good school year, and graduated everyone in a truncated, dour, and impatient ceremony. 

1968 was not a year for a Columbia student to head to medical school.  It was the revolution which beckoned, one which had political motivation as its origin - equal justice, civil rights, anti-war, and internationalism - but quickly became one of social reconfiguration. Communes, love-the-one-you're-with sexual freedom, unmatched idealism, and a youthful anti-establishmentarianism spread from east to west. The old Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen bourgeois life was dead and buried. 

Andy Phelps had squatted in an East Village basement with five Columbia refugees, a happy cabal of dope, sex, and counterculture with no designs or no intentions.  That was the purpose after all - to deny the ordinary and the bourgeois.  Jobs were for the unreformed, the nine-to-five culture was soul-robbing and deadening, marriage and children were expressions of the vast wasteland not the newly-formed. 

It was a heady time.  The demographics were such that there were more under-25s than at any previous time in American history, and all of them shared the same bubbly optimism.  We can do anything, they claimed, and while some remained fixed on social justice most headed off to the woods for a communal, uncomplicated life. 

Andy went to the north woods of California, a rainy, chilly encampment far from the city, a remote outpost in the redwoods nuzzled by Pacific fog, surviving on oats, groats, and kitchen gardens, washing dishes in small towns to make money for dope and rice, making their own clothes, bringing up children, and living off the land and within the enclosure of nature. 

By the mid-Seventies most of these asylees had returned to the fold, picking up where they left off, getting advanced degrees, applying for jobs on Wall Street, and settling down; but many like Anderson Phelps clung mightily to the ideals of an alternate lifestyle, one uncluttered and uninfected by American capitalism, one of higher values and principles. 

 

He was not alone of course, and while the commune in the forest was abandoned, there were many others in more congenial places - sunnier, warmer places but still far from the contaminating influences of the city.  By his late twenties, the lackadaisical life of the old hippy days - a stoned, drugged, sexually satiated existence without purpose - became untenable.  

While he had no intention of 'making something of himself', he needed an occupation, and turned to carpentry.  He would make simple furniture to exacting standards - not to appeal to the market but to satisfy his own needs to take Nature's bounty and turn it into something beautiful.

He worked with simple tools and ample patience and satisfied his need for meaningful occupation and legitimate purpose.  He never abandoned his sense of community and counter-culture, but only conformed to a new algorithm within it. 

He kept his hair long, cropped in a pony tail; wore a long, Biblical beard, and dressed in homespun, handmade clothes.  He wrote poetry and inspirational songs of freedom and natural wisdom, lived with a likeminded woman and with her had two children. 

 

To his credit - not many men of advancing middle age were still following the ideals framed in their youth - he remained outside the grid well into his fifties; but then sick with a number of illnesses which were resistant to herbal medicine and spiritual cures, a pesky inhibiting arthritis, and an increasingly restive partner, he moved to town, rented a small apartment-cum-workshop and began to sell his tables, chairs, and cabinets at generous but fair prices. 

No one in an urban environment can possibly avoid the influences of the media and their viral effects; and so it was that Anderson joined a number of activist groups.  Activism had matured significantly since the Sixties and had diversified.  There was not only civil rights and peace to be concerned about, but gender, the climate, political refugees, and the redistribution of wealth. 

The progressive agenda rekindled his socialist passions and he became an ardent promoter of the canon. Although the new intensity and all-encompassing, obligatory fervor was far from the laid-back, let-it-be culture which he had embraced for so long, he endorsed it.  While not the firebrand he was expected to be, he was nonetheless committed and eager. 

There was, however, something unsettling about the progressive movement - a happy camaraderie that overshadowed real political purpose. Protests, unlike those against the war in Vietnam or segregation back in his day, were more like jamborees, funfairs, outings in the sun with frisbees and sack races. Protestors howled and grimaced, but had no agenda.  It was the affair that counted, the friendships, the shared passion - not the political principle. 

 

It might be surprising for those who did not really know Anderson Phelps that he kept his distance from these public fests. To them he was a communalist who valued shared lives more than individual ones, and while today's progressive community might be larger than what he had known in the California redwoods, it was based on the same fundamental principles.  

But there was the error.  Hippie communalism was all about individualism, doing your own thing, making choices without predetermined value, acting according to individual will and vision.  All within a community to be sure, but a like-minded one, one as committed to individual freedom of expression as he was. 

The enforced community of the progressive movement, its absolute, ex cathedra canon, its fierce censorship, and its complete intolerance for straying from the straight and narrow were distasteful and annoyingly ugly. Phelps gradually, politely but decidedly left the movement, returned to his cabinet making, and rejoined his former life. 

Living in a city - over the years New Brighton had grown considerably - he could not avoid what he saw were the excesses of the progressive canon.  It was one thing, familiar to him from his foundational past, to promote gay and transgender rights and the civil rights of the black man; another thing to flaunt their identity. It was a cavalcade, a circus, a side show, a bedeviling caricature of original principle.

It was this preposterousness, this arrogant, self-assuredness, this posturing that turned him more and more away from liberal causes.  While he abjured the excessive, reflexive patriotism of the Right, and its own nostrums of righteousness, he found its core - individualism, enterprise, and lack of sanctimony - heartening and appealing. 

What was his life as a cabinet-maker about if it wasn't about enterprise, individual effort, principle and moral craftmanship? Wasn't his desire for perfection in the name of utility, comfort, and beauty aligned to conservative values of work and its rewards?

He became a burgher but in the best sense of the term - not the burgher of the hated bourgeoisie, but a citizen prospering and enabling others to prosper within a community framework through individual enterprise. 

He still lived a simple life.  The furniture in his house was his and hand-tooled, the appointments were simple but not austere, more Shaker than stripped-bare modern. Yet for all this severity, it was a comfortable home - fireplace, bookshelves, a handy kitchen, and a flower garden.

If ever there was a man true to his principles, it was Anderson Phelps; and while it took him decades to figure out how to play them out with satisfaction and a modicum of peace, he ended up exactly where he wanted to be. 

The Rich Man, The Eye Of The Needle, And The Nobility Of The Poor - Self-Perpetuating Myths

Jack Townsend was a rich man, and his wealth was earned honestly - the American dream of enterprise, hard work, discipline, diligence, and opportunity, 

He was proud of his wealth - or rather the fruits of his labor - and felt no shame or guilt or harbored no second thoughts concerning his good fortune. His wealth was not built on the backs of the poor.  On the contrary it was the facilitator of their economic mobility.

He enjoyed his wealth and had no qualms about having houses in Palm Springs and St. Bart's, an all-expenses-paid lifestyle which was his right to enjoy.  Not the wages of sin but the wages of enterprise. 

 

His wealth, as significant as it was, was simply part of the international market moving according to fixed laws of supply and demand in arcane algorithms which in the era of Artificial Intelligence, was operating more according to their own mysterious mechanisms. 

His money was invested, and from Wall Street banks it circulated around the world - money markets, gold and silver exchanges, commodity futures, buy-outs, creative financial instruments, and the growth of businesses.  He was but one cog in an imponderable mechanism, but the thousands, millions of people like him made it turn. 

Wealth was the product of civilization and its enabler. There would be no Renaissance without the Medicis. 

 

Poverty was on the mind of former President Jimmy Carter when he talked about Jesus and the nobility of the poor, and how it was harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

The poor, Carter said, were anointed, chosen by Christ because of their simplicity, their lack of worldly temptations, and their profound faith in the Lord.  Carter spent his life in the service of the poor, building houses, speaking compassionately and hopefully about a new age of equality, and working the land shoulder to shoulder with tenant farmers.

 Lyndon Johnson saw poverty as an electoral promise – the more the poor made it out of the backwoods, the more votes would be cast in his favor. He was never a rearview president, looking back on the life that had preceded him, but a doer, and he shook down, intimidated, horse traded and wrangled with Congressional leaders to give him what he wanted – millions in cash for Texas. 

Bill Clinton was a good ol’ boy at heart and hated to leave the General Store, fishing for bass on Lake Ochoa, and hunting squirrels and coons in the foothills of the Ozarks.  He loved his people, never lost an opportunity to share tales on the porch of the general store, before and after church, and coming and going from the revival tent. 

All of them missed the point, for of course there was never any inherent nobility of the poor, nor any particular divine light shining on labor.  They were at best perfect examples of Hobbes’ aphorism about life in general – nasty, brutish, and short – consigned by poor breeding, circumstance, and inertia to the lowest rung, wondering what to do next.  In The Land of Opportunity, they missed the bus. 

America is based on many fictions and this, the nobility of poverty is one of them.  Work is simply a necessity, unequally apportioned, differentially paid.  There is no nobility in factory work, farm labor, office work, or public service.  Facts of life have no inherent value.  Economic variables even less. 

Today the question is moot.  Manual labor is reduced to a few essential industries not yet subject to robotics or Artificial Intelligence, and soon the knowledge economy will become universal.  The idea of the nobility of work or the nobility of poverty is not only a Victorian fiction but totally irrelevant. 

Catholic priests take vows of poverty, and within that narrow framework, individual priests find their calling.  Father Aloysius Brophy of the Church of the Holy Family, found the parable of the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle particularly insightful; and as he looked out over his well-heeled congregation, he spun his own parables about the dangers of wealth.  

He stopped short of indicting the rich - that they ipso facto would be denied the Kingdom of Heaven because of their wealth - but issued fair warning.  The path to riches is the road to sin. 

Despite current interpretations of Matthew (Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) to equate wealth with sinful ignorance and a rejection of Christ's admonition to love the poor, Jesus meant only that a focus on wealth accumulation distracts from spiritual matters.  In fact his admonition was a derivation of ancient Hindu texts, the Upanishads which warn that the material world is nothing but Maya, illusion, a chimera of false promise. 

Townsend had left the church many years ago, not so much for the personalized, subjective blandishments of Father Murphy and his misinterpretations of the Bible but for its false idolatry. The Church, for all the heady intellectualism of Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas had fallen on hard moral times, grasping at divine straws while ignoring the undeniability of Darwin, Einstein, and Planck. 

The world was deterministic - random selection, indefinable quanta - and fixed mathematical absolutes.  The church had nothing to say either about the ineluctability of an aggressive, territorial, self-defensive human nature or a quantum physics which led its uncertainty principle to be applied to social dynamics. 

Today's progressivism stuck in Townsend's craw, for it was more idolatrous than the Vatican's facile, temporal interpretation of the foundational precepts of the Early Church. Progressives denied the ineradicable elements of human nature, insisted on social progress when none could be seen over millennia of successive generations, and proposed unfounded, idealist solutions to imagined problems. 

The nobility of the poor, an idea which Townsend thought was long dead and buried, emerged as a progressive precept.  There was not only something wrong with the accumulation of wealth per se, but it harmed the poor, a noble class, a worthy, equal piece of the social fabric. 

Nobility itself does have value as a moral feature of life - men and women of class, breeding, a sense of pride in themselves and a consideration for others were indeed noble - but when attached to a temporal equation like poverty, it loses potency and agency

And so it was that Jack Townsend went about his business, of clear mind and untroubled conscience, a man determined by factors beyond his control, with no destiny other than following those rules, not subject to any higher order of morality but respectful of the randomness of his success.