EDNOTE. Below is the (London) Times Literary
Supplement's translation of Michael Maar's original story of the von
Lichberg 1916 predecessor of LOLITA. The German original is available on the
NABOKV-L archive.
Doesn't it ring a bell? The first-person narrator, a cultivated
man of middle age, looks back on the story of an amour fou. It all starts when,
travelling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter
of the house, he is lost. She is a pre-teenager whose charms instantly enslave
him. Heedless of her tender age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she
dies, and the narrator – marked by her forever – remains alone. The name of the
girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
We know the girl and
her story, and we certainly know the title. We also think we know the author,
but there we are mistaken. His name was Heinz von Lichberg. Lichberg’s “Lolita”
is an eighteen-page tale that appeared in 1916 – forty years before its famous
homonym. It is the work of a twenty-five-year-old German author who has left
virtually no trace in the literary archives. Even bibliographically, it is well
camouflaged: “Lolita” is hidden in a volume that bears the title Die verfluchte
Gioconda (The Accursed Gioconda). It is the ninth in a collection of fifteen
tales or “grotesques”, as the subtitle describes them. As late as 1975, you
could still buy it for fifty pfennig in a second-hand bookstore in Berlin. In
the 1920s and 30s it must have been quite generally available. Today it is to be
found only in a few university libraries.
Who was this creator of
the first Lolita? The author does not appear in any encyclopedia of literature.
The only work of biographical reference that mentions him, the Deutsche
Bibliothek, does not even get his dates right. That seems forgivable, because
Lichberg was a pen name and a pseudonym. The real name of the author was Heinz
von Eschwege. Descended from an ancient Hessian family, von Eschwege was born on
September 7, 1890, in Marburg, the son of a lieutenant-colonel in the infantry.
(Heinz chose the pseudonym “Lichberg” as one of the ancient aristocratic names
of his family, connected to a hill near the town of Eschwege in Hessen called
the “Leuchtberg”. Family legend had it that it was so named because it once, as
the scene of battles, glowed with blood.) At the age of seven he lost his
mother. In the First World War he was a lieutenant in the Naval Artillery.
During this period he published, besides Die verfluchte Gioconda and an
anthology of German poetry, contributions to the journals Jugend and
Simplicissimus. After the War – a volume of his own poems had meanwhile appeared
– he worked in Berlin as a journalist for the newspapers of Scherl-Verlag, the
nucleus of the later Hugenberg empire. His letters are headed
Eschwege-Lichberg, and he still signed himself Eschwege, but he published under
the name Heinz von Lichberg. He became popular in 1929, when he flew as a
reporter for Scherl-Verlag on the transatlantic voyage of the Graf Zeppelin; his
account of this journey, still obtainable in second-hand bookshops today, was
successfully marketed to a proud nation under the title Zeppelin fährt um die
Welt (Zeppelin Goes Round the World). On this trip Heinz von Lichberg saw New
York – over a decade before Vladimir Nabokov did.
It is known,
though it is still a remarkable thought, that the later arrival came within an
inch of committing a historic folly. In the afterword to the novel that made him
world-famous and financially independent, Nabokov writes that he was often
tempted to destroy the work in gestation:
"Once or twice I was on the
point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as
the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped
by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the
rest of my life."
What would have happened if the dangerous bundle
of papers had been burnt? Nabokov would have died a penurious “writer’s writer”.
Google would not spit out 14 million entries under a single title. Lolita,
Texas, would not have considered applying to change its name. The literature of
the twentieth century would have lost one of its most grandiose works.
And yet there would have been a printed “Lolita” in the world. On
reading it today and comparing it with the novel, a slight feeling of unreality
and déjà-vu comes over one – as if we had entered one of the labyrinthine
stories of Borges. The core of the tale, which is of little artistic merit,
depicts a journey to Spain. The anonymous first-person narrator sets off from
southern Germany, after bidding farewell to a pair of elderly brothers who own a
tavern he frequents, and passes through Paris to Madrid and then to Alicante.
There he takes lodgings in a pension by the sea. He plans no more than a quiet
holiday. But then something happens: after a brief delay, a first, fatal glance,
that cannot but remind us of the later Lolita. In that book the first-person
narrator Humbert Humbert makes a journey, with the intention of finding a quiet
place to work with a lake nearby. In the little town of Ramsdale he calls on the
landlady, Charlotte Haze, whom he finds as unattractive as her house. Inwardly
resolved to leave, he accompanies Mrs Haze to what she calls the “piazza” of the
establishment, and suddenly – “without the least warning, a blue sea-wave
swelled under my heart” – he sees the immortal child, the rebirth of his first
love by the sea:
"It was the same child – the same frail, honey-hued
shoulders, the same silky supple back, the same chestnut head of hair."
So too one glance is enough for Lichberg’s narrator, just as the
beauty of his young girl also is darkened by a mystery from the past:
"The friendly, talkative landlord showed me a room with a wonderful view
of the sea, and there was nothing to prevent me enjoying a week of undisturbed
beauty.
Until on the second day I saw Lolita, Severo’s daughter.
She was very young by our Northern standards, with shadows under her
southern eyes and hair of an unusual reddish gold. Her body was boyishly slim
and supple and her voice full and dark. "
Like Humbert, our narrator
is immediately bewitched, and abandons any thought of departure. His Lolita,
like Dolores Haze later, is subject to violent changes of mood. Does she want
something from him or not? Is she hiding secrets in her child’s breast? As in
the case of the agreeably surprised Humbert Humbert, it is eventually Lolita who
seduces the narrator, not the other way round. The author does not say so
bluntly, but his ellipses and circumlocutions leave the reader in little doubt
of the faits bruts:
"There were days on which Lolita’s large eyes looked
at me shyly with a mute question, and evenings on which I saw her suddenly break
into convulsive weeping.
Never in that time did I think of leaving. The
South – and Lolita – held me captive.
Golden, hot days and silver,
melancholy nights.
And then came an evening, dream-like as in a
fairy-tale yet unforgettably real, when Lolita sat on my balcony, as so often,
and softly sang to me.
But suddenly she let the guitar slide to the
floor and came with faltering steps towards me by the railing. And while her
eyes sought the shimmering moonlight on the water, she slipped her trembling
arms like a begging child around my neck, leant her head on my breast and began
to sob without restraint. In her eyes there were tears, but her sweet mouth was
laughing.
The miracle occurred.
“You are so strong”, she
whispered. "
That is both as inexplicit and as unambiguous as befits
the period. The days and nights devoted by a middle-aged lover to a lovely
nymphet become sexually indecent only later, in Nabokov, who at first thought of
publishing his manuscript anonymously, and later only just escaped the censor.
The correspondence of core plot, narrative perspective and choice of name is
nonetheless striking. But unfortunately, as Van Veen remarks in Ada, there is no
logical law that would tell us when a given number of coincidences ceases to be
accidental. In its absence, there is no way of answering, and still less of
dismissing, the unavoidable question: can Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the
imperishable Lolita, the proud black swan of modern fiction, have known of the
ugly duckling that was its precursor? Could he – if only unconsciously, since a
conscious quotation would presumably have been unthinkable – have been under its
stimulus?
He could easily, at any rate, have crossed its author’s
path. Heinz von Lichberg lived for fifteen years in the south-west of Berlin,
practically in the same neighbourhood as did Nabokov. As a child, Nabokov had
often stayed in Berlin when his family was en route to France. A year after the
family fled from Russia in 1919, his parents and siblings moved to the Grunewald
district of the city, where Vladimir visited them during his holidays from
Cambridge University. In March 1922, his father was assassinated in the Berlin
Philharmonic Theatre by a Russian monarchist. That summer Vladimir moved from
England to Berlin, and – he least of anyone would have expected this – stayed
there till 1937. In those fifteen Berlin years he became engaged to a German
girl, and separated from her; got to know Vera Slonim, and married her; became
the father of a son, and also became Sirin – the outstanding Russian writer of
the younger generation. There he wrote nine novels in Russian, and had almost
finished the tenth and greatest, The Gift, when he began his conquest of
Anglo-American literature with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
None of which tells us whether Sirin-Nabokov might have read the
German “Lolita”. So far as his knowledge of matters German went, Nabokov always
remained reticent, if not in denial. He let it be understood that, cocooning
himself in the Russian exile community for fear of losing his mother tongue, he
spoke hardly any German, and read no German books. Nabokov indeed never mastered
German anything like as well as French. But he was perhaps not lying when he
asserted a “fair knowledge of German” in his application for a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1947. It is in any case scarcely imaginable that such a polyglot
genius could live in a country for so long without acquiring at least a passive
command of its language. Nor did his late – only too understandable – antipathy
towards Germans prevent his “fair knowledge” of their language extending to
their literature. Nabokov was not merely familiar with the German romantics
and classics, his work is peppered with allusions to them.He treasured
Goethe and Hofmannsthal, honoured Kafka and despised Thomas Mann (whose works he
studied with the aid of a dictionary). He translated various poems by Heine and
the “dedication” from Goethe’s Faust into Russian. His commentary on Pushkin’s
Evgeny Onegin alone reveals a specialist erudition that not every Germanist
could display. Material for his novel Despair came from German newspapers and in
one of his stories he took a side-swipe at Leonhard Frank’s novel Bruder und
Schwester, occasionally regarded as a source of Ada.
Now, a man who
knew of Leonhard Frank could certainly have come across Heinz von Lichberg. Not
as a novelist, but as a journalist on the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Lichberg was
permanently present during the fifteen years that Nabokov lived in the city. Yet
assuming – let us say, by one of those coincidences in which life is richer than
any novel should be – that the German’s collection of “grotesques” fell into the
Russian’s hands: would Nabokov have been interested in the theme of Lolita so
early on? Certainly. Twenty years before completing his own novel on the
subject, he had already put a sketch of it into the mouth of a secondary
character. “Ah, if only I had a tick or two”, sighs the hero’s landlord in The
Gift, “what a novel I would whip off!”:
"Imagine this kind of thing: an
old dog – but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness – gets to know
a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl – you know what I
mean – when nothing is formed yet but she has a way of walking that drives you
out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale with blue under the eyes –
and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long
thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of
them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment, the
itch, the mad hopes."
And here Nabokov did go on, writing a short novel
five years later: The Enchanter, in which the germ cell of Lolita had already
developed into a full embryo. Ten years after that, he began the composition of
the novel which, despite every temptation of the incinerator, he triumphantly
completed in the spring of 1954 . .
.