Lolita Liking
Easy On Me - Lifein3D (Adele Cover)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsyA1EoykMShall I bother to bore you all with my thoughts. I know you are not the slightest bit interested, but my left middle finger needs the exercise.
A couple, may be even a few, weeks ago I finished Tolstoy's War and Peace - almost as long as the war itself. I had had the volumes for over fifty years but never opened them. Then easier on the brain read Somerset Maughan's 'A Writer's Notebook', written the year I popped my head out in 1949!
The former lived from 1828 - 1910, the latter from 1874 - 1965. Amazing how time gobbles up all our lives and achievements and renders them unimportant. It represents a time frame that undoutably incorporates many living humans and dead ones without number.
If, dear reader, you are anything like me, you will relate the significance of dates to yourself. For example my parents were both just one when Tolstoy died on that remote Russian railway station, and I was about to set foot in the big wide world of work when Maughan 'popped his cloggs' at ninety-one.
I have just looked the man up on Wikipedia, and never could the term, 'Man of Letters' be better applied. What a legacy of written work! One of his last entries in the afore-mentioned book, was his thoughts on reaching seventy-five, which I could relate to now.
Just one quote will have to suffice; as it were merely a sip from that vast literary ocean :
"For no sensible person can deny that throughout the history of the world, the sum of unhappiness has been far, far greater than the sum of happiness. Only in brief periods has man lived save in continual fear and danger of violent death and it is not only in the savage state as Hobbes asserted, that his life has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Throughout the ages many have found comfort in a life to come. They are the lucky ones. Faith to those that have it, solves difficulties reason finds insoluable."
I followed this book with Nabakov's 'Lolita', which caused an international sensation when first published in 1955. In that year as a small boy, I found myself staring adoringly at a Vauxhall Cresta, parked locally, then the epitomy of the American Dream.
Twelve year old Lolita was the 'American dream' of Nabakov's character, the middle-aged Humbolt Humbolt, and maybe even of Nabakov himself. Was the choice of the name so close to 'Humbug' an accident I wonder?
It is an account of a secret obsession. The inner workings of a devious - some might say decadent - mind, made public. They spend almost two years driving backwards and forwards across the United States, trying to avoid attention and detection. It was an erotic but proscribed relationship.
It is an account of sexual frustration and guilt. An example of where private passion could not be reconciled with what was socially and morally acceptible in 1950's America and indeed still is. In short it dared to breach a fundamental taboo. It pre-dates the decade in which Philip Larkin satirically alleged 'sex was discovered' - nonsense of course.
It works its way through dense and convoluted prose to a tragic and inevitable denouement in violence and death. Perversion is no respecter of person and the immoral are not freed of moral judgmentalism of others. Guilt must have its punishment, offense its revenge.
It was also topical. In 1957, twenty-two year old pop-singer, Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen year old cousin, which caused a storm of protest but was not prevented. Incidentally the marriage lasted thirteen years and on his death, when she was seventy-eight she recalled “I was called the child bride, but I was the adult and Jerry was the child,” so it appears there was no lasting damage done - well hopefully - apart that is to his career. The issue remains very controversial to this day.
Needless to say the book was a huge commercial success world-wide. There is an insatiable appetite for the sensual and erotic even in the most puritanical of minds. I am about two thirds through it. I have not cheated to see how it ends but it has become somewhat tiresome. In some ways it replicates sex without the climax, a sort of euphemistic cowardice.
How could it be that so many years passed before I discovered it? (I was always a late developer!) Now I have put it down, I wonder if I shall pick it up ever again? Sometimes it is better not to know how these things end. (I have picked it up and have nearly reached the end) I depart this brief consideration with a quote that in a way sums up the whole:
My car is limping, Delores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.However I am breathless in wonder at the mental dexterity and imagination of Russian Vladimir Nabikov's (1899 - 1977) ability to write so fluently and expressively in what was effectively a learned second language. It puts me to shame in my first.
So in lighter vein, I have now embarked on a more recent tome: Sue Townsend's 1993 'Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years', the fourth of eight, in a series about this unfortunate child of the 'Seventies. Sue Townsend has a rather remarkable life story herself.
What she doesn't admit to, is that she based the character of Adrian Mole on me! I think it is time this significant literary fact was revealed to the world and that I got some recognition for it. (I jest of course but only in part) Sadly Sue died ten years ago so there is little hope I shall be acknowledged or compensated.
Interestingly in the context of this light-hearted rumination, she starts Adrian's hilarious diary with a reference to Nabakov and Tolstoy. As yet she hasn't referred to Maughan, but she might.
She/he write: "Nabakov, fellow author, you should have been alive on that day. It would have shocked even you to see Rosie Mole pouting in her miniskirt, pink tights and purple cropped top! They looked like Lolita and Humbert Humbert."
The bit that made me laugh out loud was reference to Adrian's 'experimental novel', 'Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland' originally written only with consonants, which he sends to Sir Gordon Giles, Prince Charles' agent, who sent it back 'suggesting he add the vowels'!
Poor Adrian is unable to see why he is a failure and held up to such ridicule. He is blind to his own faults but not to others'. In a way he is the universal man for the modern age, yet we cannot help liking and empathising with him in his naive journey of mundanity.
'The Wilderness Years' is of course an illusion to Prime Minister, Winston Churchill whom Adrian would like to emulate. He sees himself as a great poet and writer. Only trouble is, no one else does and everyone in his circle seems to succeed where he fails.
Love eludes him because the love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite (DPhil), despises and avoids him, although retaining remnants of a youthful infatuation. He always arrives late. He epitomises the antithesis of the Wokist focus on 'equality, diversity and inclusion', so popular from Blair onwards.
When we read any literary text, we are 'teleported' into the mind of the author and of the characters he relates or creates. We cannot do otherwise. It is like plugging another device into your computer. It is a mind to mind transference. Thus in all the works mentioned above, we relate and transpose to our own lives and experience - the people, the places, the events.
Townsend's book is set in 1991, when Adrian is allegedly twenty-four. I was in London at the time. On the 15th January, having stocked up on 'tins of beans, candles, Jaffa Cakes, household matches, torch batteries, Paracetamol, multivitamins, Ry-kings and tins of corned beef ' - in short all the essentials for a nuclear holocaust! - Adrian writes, "Midnight. We are at war with Iraq. I phoned my mother in Leicester and told her to keep the dog in."
At that same historic moment, I was in Central London, in a sleeping bag in my car, listening to the news on the BBC World Service when it was announced the first American missile had fired.
I had just watched at the Barbican, 'Under the Sheltering Sky', which seemed somewhat appropriate as I settled down to sleep on that dark and desolate street. It may not be too pompous or an exaggeration to say that it marked our entry into diabolical phase of civilization - or lack of it - that was labelled 'The New World Order', the results of which we see played out over thirty years later.
We cannot help thinking that history and the world revolve around us, as it is the only way we can think - rather like Adrian Mole. But at the same time we are aware seven billion others think in the same way. It is only our empathy that mitigates against selfishness, alienation, apathy, callousness, mendacity - even murder!
Everyone of those seven billion, for a brief span, carries a perception of self and the world he experiences. No thought is truly original but is seeded and recyled like an old bottle.
Yet we know ourselves to be unique, each endeavouring anew to come to terms with ourselves and a workable hypothesis of how things are.
However far we roam, allegorically we either play out the Prodigal Son or hand-washing Pilot; Shakespeare's Hamlet or Macbeth. What is the essence of 'soul' other than truth and justice and being at peace with one's self?
At the risk of parodying Adrian, and making his poems look good, one of mine from then:
Sheltering Sky
What makes for joy between two minds?
Where in some timeless space do spirits meet?
Protected place where stalking darkness waits
To intervene in shadows. A sweeping indentation.
Plunged into a sweet and sticky syrup of desire,
Marked by the smooth and rounded shapes of skin,
White bone china draped in muslin,
Mysterious bodies wheel their mirroring course.
As flock of birds in flight
Lapwinging their way across the contours of the night.
Blown by the wind, Sahara hot and dry,
The rippling waves of sand explore.
In undulating stillness down
Towards the lush and verdant watering hole,
Where with arms outstretched and a mighty cry,
They plunge their bodies in.
Their floods are swelled by falling rain.
Here only touch and smell assert their dues.
A gentle sound of tinkling bells
Amongst the dry and arid dunes.
