In the summer of 1963, between leaving school and going to University, whilst I was working as a warehouseman in a textile mill at Greengates, Bradford, I picked up on a city bookstall a bulky 'novel' called Pale Fire by an Russo-American writer named Vladimir Nabokov. This oddity, which comprised a 999-line poem in heroic couplets together with a commentary on the poem (the two purporting to be by different persons), proved the most exquisite reading experience of my life up to that date. Thereafter I bought what Nabokov novels I could find in print (Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading), and then each 'new' Nabokov novel as it appeared - though 'new' requires inverted commas here since this author's mode of publication seemed to consist of an alternation of original novels composed in English and translations (or recoveries) of novels originally written in Russian. When eventually I got a 'real' job, I graduated from buying the various paperbacks to buying the Weidenfeld and Nicolson clothbound editions as they came out (immediately, pleasingly, in uniform jacket and binding). No other contemporary novelist, then or since, has persuaded me into such consistent extravagance. And every two or three years I re-read half a dozen of Nabokov's books - novels or short-story collections.
Imagine, then, with what delight I read, towards the end of 1986. that the long-lost legendary forerunner of Lolita, a novella entitled The Enchanter, had been found, translated, and was to be published in the New Year. It had to be assumed, of course, that an infant of around a fifth of the size of Lolita could hardly contain the depth of characterization, rich comic irony, and complexity of plot and nuance that the full-grown novel possesses. Nevertheless, I found in The Enchanter a more than satisfactory helping of those qualities which long ago made Nabokov my favourite novelist. Now Nabokov is an author about whom much has been written: he is hardly an alien, unknown quantity: so that it is puzzling to be confronted by so much ineptness amongst the book's reviewers, and notably in Angela Carter - who one might have thought would be an ideal reader of Nabokov.
Her obtuse account of the book (in The Guardian) turns on two interrelated misconceptions. One is that the story is not merely "moral" but "moralistic": she writes that the would-be paedophiliac Enchanter receives at the book's end "a curiously moralistic and awesomely rapid punishment". The other is that the story is pornographic: Carter writes of Nabokov's nymphet:
"She is the hapless object of desire, the pure, anonymous creation of soft core pornography."
and later that as the tale progresses
"... the paedophile's desire starts to seem as feasible as the next man's, and the moral underpinning of the story falls away, leaving, surely unintentionally, only the infrastructure of pornography."
There is an immediate problem in all this: how can a book be at once "pornographic" (which by definition includes the sense "immoral") and "moralistic"? The author of such a tale would have to be schizoid, eating his cake and refusing it at one and the same time. This seems to me to be way off the mark. The Enchanter is thematically unified and perfectly consistent. Carter has quite simply missed the point of the thing.
The novella's outward story is about the perverse desire of a man of forty for a girl of twelve: he marries the girl's valetudinarian mother (much as Humbert Humbert later marries Mrs Haze in Lolita) in the hope of eventually gaining access to the object of his desire. But the inner theme of the tale concerns the space that exists between fantasy and reality, between the desires that we entertain and the world that inhibits and complicates their translation into actualities. The enchanter's mistake is literally to seek to make his dream come true: Nabokov ironically demonstrates the disaster to which such a confusion of the realms of imagination and reality may lead.
When, at the very beginning of the story, the enchanter thinks about his obsession, he says plainly that it is only manageable because it is theoretical: he cannot bear to imagine causing a real person pain or revulsion:
"The limitations I have established for my yearning, the masks I invent for it when, in real life, I conjure up an absolutely invisible method of sating my passion, have a providential sophistry. I am a pickpocket, not a burglar."
"... limitations... masks..." Precisely. As long as it remains in the realms of imagination, his obsession is contained, harmless, safe (to himself). But the appearance in the flesh of the girl of his dreams tempts him - seduces him, even - into the fatal absurdity of translating his fantasies to the rebarbative realm of the real. In "beginning to feel at home with the artificial style of the still not fully comprehensible, many-ringed dream with which he was already so indistinctly but so firmly entwined", the enchanter confuses the boundaries between the two realms.
In the clearest of all Nabokov's indications of the tale's controlling theme, he shows that the enchanter is himself perfectly aware of his mistake, but unable, on account of the magnitude of his obsession, to withdraw from his pursuit:
"He took precise measure of how far he had come, evaluated the entire instability and spectrality of his calculations, this whole quiet madness, the evident error of the obsession, which was free and genuine only when flowering within the confines of fantasy but which had deviated from that sole legitimate form..."
These quotations should be enough to show that Nabokov is not concerned with either "moral" or "moralistic" considerations. The fate of the enchanter is not a matter of "punishment" handed out by a judgmental novelist, but a matter of artistic and aesthetic nemesis: in infringing the rules of his own game, in shifting the terms of his fantasy into the world of reality, the enchanter must pay reality's price. His movement (as he thinks) towards the realization of his obsession, to the 'possession' of the object of his desire, is charted by Nabokov as an inevitable (and precipitate) movement towards death. The effort to make fantasy actuality renders the realm of actuality uninhabitable. Literally, at the end of the story, the enchanter 'breaks' the frame within which its images ought, by his own lights, to have been contained. The explosion of his surreptitious orgasm finds its ironic analogue in the smashing of the fatal truck into his body: "and the film of life had burst". It's germane to point out that he commits suicide here, visiting upon himself the destiny which his conduct has invoked. His death is not, as Carter's account suggests, an accident.
Nor is the novella in any sense pornographic. The spirit of ironic comedy is anathema to pornography, which must maintain for itself a strict temperature of seriousness. Witty references, as the story reaches (in every sense) its climax, to the nympholept's "enchanted yardstick" or "magic wand" make it impossible for one to view the proceedings as other than absurd.
Nabokov has said that Lolita embodied his love affair with the English language, the language which he had now (as an emigrant from Europe to America) to chosen as his medium of expression. One might equally say of The Enchanter that it memorializes his love for the Russian language - that exquisite vehicle which circumstances compelled him to abandon.
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