Subject
THOUGHTS: Henry Houssaye's 1945 novel "Lolita"
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Date
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Maurice Couturier, editor of the French Pleiade edition and author of
several volumes on VN, writes:
Dear List
Jeff Edmunds, who has already done so much for all of us Nabokovians,
sent me
a message a few weeks ago asking me if I had come across a book
entitled “Lolita” written by one Henry Houssaye ((H.H.!!!) and published
by a
Paris publisher, Jean Vigneau, in 1945. He claimed to have leafed
through the
book but could not say much about it. Having enjoyed Jeff’s
impersonation of
Jean Lahougue and his clever little book, I first had my doubts about
this bit
of information, fearing that it was a hoax. I googled the “Bibliothèque
Nationale” and didn’t find the book in the catalogue at first; I have
tried
again as I was writing this little piece: they have it of course. I have
obtained a dilapidated copy from PriceMinister for a very reasonable
price
(4€). Thanks be to Jeff!
When I started reading it, I was greatly disappointed: no Lolita in the
first
two thirds of the book which tells the story of three Paris students,
Raymond,
Armand and Pier’Angelo, the first studying literature and philosophy,
the
second reading law but practising painting, the third a medical student.
One
of the leading topics of conversation between the three, apart from
girls, is
suicide, Raymond being the most splenetic of the three, the least
attracted to
women; they call him l’Ennuyé (the bored one). He asks Pier’Angelo to
give him
cyanide and writes a suicide note (a subject that David Lodge deals with
in
his forthcoming novel, “Death Sentence”, which my wife and I have just
finished translating). But he doesn’t commit suicide until he has helped
his
sister, Simone, to have an abortion. No Lolita, then, in this first
part.
In the second part, ten years later, Armand, a thirty-year-old Don Juan,
becomes rather blasé until he meets a bronze-skinned Lolita who is
sixteen and
a virgin. She is very silent and shows no sign of being really in love
with
him. Because Armand is wealthy, her family consent to the marriage.
Weeks
after the wedding, Armand kills her and goes to prison. In the memoir he
addresses to Pier’Angelo, hoping to get some poison from him, he
explains what
happened. He had a twin-sister, Charlotte (!) called Lolita, who died
before
the end of her first year, and whom the family described as “ravissante
comme
un démon”. He thought she died in order not “to breathe his air, and not
to
take anything from him”. This sister had haunted him ever since; and
when he
met teenage Lolita, he felt that she was some kind of reincarnation. The
marriage was never consummated but, one night, he had a sudden
hallucination
as if he wanted to be one with his dead sister: he started wrestling
with his
young bride and killed her in order to silence her. Armand dies of a
stroke
soon after sending that memoir to his friend.
Both stories deal with suicide and the difficult relationship,
sentimentally
and above all sexually, between a brother and his sister. These students
have
read Freud, as they acknowledge, and, though the word incest is never
used,
they seem to be both terribly tempted by it and afraid of it. Lolita is
not a
nymphet and Armand is not a nympholept either. The novel is not a great
book;
its style is pompous, its characters hardly plausible, and there is a
morbid
strain of existentialism running through it.
Henry Houssaye is not the nineteenth-entury academician, but a
translator and
writer who wrote another novel, “Laurence” (another ‘L’) published in
1944 and
a three-act play, “Printemps”, played in Paris in 1945 and published the
same
year. The Bibliothèque Nationale claims to have a third edition of
“Lolita”
published in 1945, which seems to suggest that the book was written
earlier,
but my copy makes no reference to previous editions. In that post-war
period,
things may have been a little confused.
Despite some of the cothere was a copy at the New York Public Library; and even if he had
nobody
would suggest that he plagiarized it. It has nothing in common with his
incandescent novel, except a name, a title. That’s the interesting
point, of
course. As I already mentioned to the list, the name appears many times
in
French literature - as it does in other literatures of course, but
perhaps not
to the same extent (that remains to be corroborated!). There is magic in
this
name for a French writer, as Valery Larbaud poetically explained. In the
paper
I read at Oxford last July, I claimed, half-humorously and with a touch
of
French chauvinism, that, for a number of obvious and less obvious
reasons,
Nabokov’s “Lolita” partly belongs to our national literature. At least,
this
little book gives further evidence that the name is dear to French
writers.
And let us not forget who unearthed this little book!
Nabokovement vôtre.
Maurice Couturier
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
several volumes on VN, writes:
Dear List
Jeff Edmunds, who has already done so much for all of us Nabokovians,
sent me
a message a few weeks ago asking me if I had come across a book
entitled “Lolita” written by one Henry Houssaye ((H.H.!!!) and published
by a
Paris publisher, Jean Vigneau, in 1945. He claimed to have leafed
through the
book but could not say much about it. Having enjoyed Jeff’s
impersonation of
Jean Lahougue and his clever little book, I first had my doubts about
this bit
of information, fearing that it was a hoax. I googled the “Bibliothèque
Nationale” and didn’t find the book in the catalogue at first; I have
tried
again as I was writing this little piece: they have it of course. I have
obtained a dilapidated copy from PriceMinister for a very reasonable
price
(4€). Thanks be to Jeff!
When I started reading it, I was greatly disappointed: no Lolita in the
first
two thirds of the book which tells the story of three Paris students,
Raymond,
Armand and Pier’Angelo, the first studying literature and philosophy,
the
second reading law but practising painting, the third a medical student.
One
of the leading topics of conversation between the three, apart from
girls, is
suicide, Raymond being the most splenetic of the three, the least
attracted to
women; they call him l’Ennuyé (the bored one). He asks Pier’Angelo to
give him
cyanide and writes a suicide note (a subject that David Lodge deals with
in
his forthcoming novel, “Death Sentence”, which my wife and I have just
finished translating). But he doesn’t commit suicide until he has helped
his
sister, Simone, to have an abortion. No Lolita, then, in this first
part.
In the second part, ten years later, Armand, a thirty-year-old Don Juan,
becomes rather blasé until he meets a bronze-skinned Lolita who is
sixteen and
a virgin. She is very silent and shows no sign of being really in love
with
him. Because Armand is wealthy, her family consent to the marriage.
Weeks
after the wedding, Armand kills her and goes to prison. In the memoir he
addresses to Pier’Angelo, hoping to get some poison from him, he
explains what
happened. He had a twin-sister, Charlotte (!) called Lolita, who died
before
the end of her first year, and whom the family described as “ravissante
comme
un démon”. He thought she died in order not “to breathe his air, and not
to
take anything from him”. This sister had haunted him ever since; and
when he
met teenage Lolita, he felt that she was some kind of reincarnation. The
marriage was never consummated but, one night, he had a sudden
hallucination
as if he wanted to be one with his dead sister: he started wrestling
with his
young bride and killed her in order to silence her. Armand dies of a
stroke
soon after sending that memoir to his friend.
Both stories deal with suicide and the difficult relationship,
sentimentally
and above all sexually, between a brother and his sister. These students
have
read Freud, as they acknowledge, and, though the word incest is never
used,
they seem to be both terribly tempted by it and afraid of it. Lolita is
not a
nymphet and Armand is not a nympholept either. The novel is not a great
book;
its style is pompous, its characters hardly plausible, and there is a
morbid
strain of existentialism running through it.
Henry Houssaye is not the nineteenth-entury academician, but a
translator and
writer who wrote another novel, “Laurence” (another ‘L’) published in
1944 and
a three-act play, “Printemps”, played in Paris in 1945 and published the
same
year. The Bibliothèque Nationale claims to have a third edition of
“Lolita”
published in 1945, which seems to suggest that the book was written
earlier,
but my copy makes no reference to previous editions. In that post-war
period,
things may have been a little confused.
Despite some of the cothere was a copy at the New York Public Library; and even if he had
nobody
would suggest that he plagiarized it. It has nothing in common with his
incandescent novel, except a name, a title. That’s the interesting
point, of
course. As I already mentioned to the list, the name appears many times
in
French literature - as it does in other literatures of course, but
perhaps not
to the same extent (that remains to be corroborated!). There is magic in
this
name for a French writer, as Valery Larbaud poetically explained. In the
paper
I read at Oxford last July, I claimed, half-humorously and with a touch
of
French chauvinism, that, for a number of obvious and less obvious
reasons,
Nabokov’s “Lolita” partly belongs to our national literature. At least,
this
little book gives further evidence that the name is dear to French
writers.
And let us not forget who unearthed this little book!
Nabokovement vôtre.
Maurice Couturier
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm