John Bertram - Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokovs Novel in Art and Design

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to free content, and information on the latest new releases and must-have designing resources! Plus, receive a coupon code to use on your first purchase from MyDesignShop.com for signing up.

or visit us online to sign up at

http://howdesign.com/ebook-promo

John Bertram dedicates this book to his wife, Ann Magnuson.

Yuri Leving dedicates this book to his wife, Ella Leving.

Contents

Mary Gaitskill

This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. (Pale Fire)

This could be Humbert Humbert agonizing over Lolita after he has ruined her life and his, but it is not; it is Charles Kinbote, King of fabulous Zembla, musing with wistful offhandedness about his young, beautiful, unloved, and undesired wife, Disa. In waking hours he feels nothing for her but friendly indifference and bleak respect, but in his dreams, these dry sentiments are saturated and swollen until they [exceed] in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. In life he casually, near accidentally tortures her; in his dreams he remorsefully adores her.

In Pale Fire, Disa is a minor character who receives only a pathetic handful of the books 214 pages. But with the poignancy and plangency of sorrow, she illumines Pale Fires core; the delusional dream, the preposterous poem, the crumbling bridge between mundane reality and fantastic ideal, the tormenting ideal that insists on bleeding through to the surface (all peach syrup, regularly rippled with pale blue) even as it sinks in the mud below. If Kinbote, though King, cant have the one he really wants, Humbert Humbert can: In Lolita the dreamer is in the drivers seat, reality is broken, and it is the raving dream that broke it. Humbert seldom if ever dreams of Lolita, even when he has lost her. Except that he does. In his grossly unbeautiful dreams, Lolita appears as Charlotte, her disgusting mother, and as Valeria, Humberts equally disgusting former wife, both of whom disgustingly loved him:

She did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer balls bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.

I mustve read Lolita five times before I even noticed this hideously gorgeous paragraph, this miserable aside linking the fatally despised women with the fatally desired girl. Part of Lolitas power is in its extreme oppositions: Even Humberts fanatically one-directional desire for little Dolly is made more delicious by the sharp tonal oppositions in her two-fold nature, the tender dreamy childishness and eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud of her female beingreally, of any being. The tension between Humberts near-erotic revulsion for women/his miasmic desire for girls, his human despair/his demonic joy, is even more intense; the dream which tragically joins these poles suggests that one has been a palimpsest for the other all along.

So how does one, one very normal one, put this on a book jacket? How even to try? It is remarkable to me how many have succeeded in capturing even a fractional flash of Nabokovs ingeniously juggled, weirdly populated planets with their many moons. Lolita may be fairly described as a threnody for the destruction of a childs life, yet a high percentage of the covers go for cute: whimsical buttons on bright red, an ejaculating pink plastic gun, a crenellated candy-pink shell, a pale-pink plastic necklace spelling the titular name, that name elsewhere spelled with a bobby sock L, still multiple elsewheres with a leopard-print mascara wand, a paper-doll leg, a crushed red lollipop o. Some covers are bric-a-brac-ishly decorated (bleeding old-maidish mum with dripping chocolate petals, Lolita in crazy-quilt neon lace, a silhouette man trapped in a cubist blue teardrop, a pink bird in a rigid cage), still others are subtle to the point of opacity (the corners of two pink walls are unsurprised to meet a white ceiling), while a few others are deliberately ugly (horrible-looking old men, one of them open-mouthed, bare-chested, and practically reaching into his pants).

They are all fun to look at, even the ugly ones. For me, cuteness (Yes, snub-nosed, even when there is no nose! Ads and magazine pictures, of course!) comes consistently closest to the books cruel and ardent heart. For Humberts aesthetic infatuation is based on a tyrannical ideal, and cuteness is a kind of idealone that is heartless, breathless, timeless, and ageless as Bambi, static and hard-edged, perfect in its way, with all excess flesh and unseemly feeling cut outoh, Humbert, there can be no aurochs and angels in this cartoon heaven-cum-hell!

But the best cover, I think, is not cute. It is the 1997 Vintage paperback edition of the book, featuring a simple photographic image with a complex penumbra: a bare-legged girl, shown from the waist down, wearing a flared skirt and oxford shoes. The photo is bright white, granular gray, and deeply dark; it is delicate (the slender legs) and thick (the big shoes and skirt). The girls legs are beautiful and very vulnerable, in a knock-kneed position with a large gap between the calves, and the toes adorably, spastically touching each other. Charming, until you consider the full body posture suggested by the position: It expresses fear. Either the girl has cerebral palsy or she is cringing. You dont see the full image, so your first and (probably) only conscious response is appreciation of the subjects touching, awkward beauty. But a second, instinctive and less aesthetic understanding of the image (creeping quietly up under the first), shades mild appreciation with something too dark to quite