Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design
By John Bertram and Yuri Leving
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About this ebook
Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov scholars survey more than half a century of Lolita covers. You'll also find thoughtful essays from such design luminaries as Mary Gaitskill, Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut, Peter Mendelsund, Jessica Helfand, Alice Twemlow, Johanna Drucker, Leland de la Durantaye, Ellen Pifer, and Stephen Blackwell.
Through the lenses of design and literature, Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl tells the strange design history of one of the most important novels of the 20th century--and offers a new way for thinking visually about difficult books. You'll never look at Lolita the same way again.
John Bertram
An Adams Media author.
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Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl - John Bertram
Pictures of Lo
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 book’s 214 pages. But with the poignancy and plangency of sorrow, she illumines Pale Fire’s 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, can’t have the one he really wants, Humbert Humbert can: In Lolita the dreamer is in the driver’s 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, Humbert’s 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 ball’s 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 must’ve 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 Lolita’s power is in its extreme oppositions: Even Humbert’s 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 being—really, of any being. The tension between Humbert’s 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 Nabokov’s ingeniously juggled, weirdly populated planets with their many moons. Lolita may be fairly described as a threnody for the destruction of a child’s 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 book’s cruel and ardent heart. For Humbert’s aesthetic infatuation is based on a tyrannical ideal, and cuteness is a kind of ideal—one 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 out—oh, 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 girl’s 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 don’t see the full image, so your first and (probably) only conscious response is appreciation of the subject’s 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 see, which we nonetheless feel intensely in our reptile spines.
But the blurb on that cover is more disturbing than the image, for it sincerely states that Lolita, in which the heroine is seduced, kidnapped, and grossly used, her mother humiliated at length before dying violently, the seducer himself shattered, his rival murdered, the heroine finally dead along with her still-born baby girl
—according to the blurb, this madcap orgy of Thanatos is The only convincing love story of the century
!!!! It is not shocking that someone said this, especially given that this someone was Gregor von Rezzori writing for Vanity Fair. But it is quietly outrageous that a mainstream publisher would choose to put it on the cover, directly over those understandably frightened legs.
I am not the only one to feel this way; if you google the phrase, you will find all kinds of online fussing about it: Lolita is not about love, because love is always mutual; Lolita is about obsession, which is never, ever love, and Nabokov himself was so disappointed that people did not understand this and take away the right message. I am in sympathy with the fussers, and almost am one myself, for how could anyone call this feeding frenzy of selfishness, devouring, and destruction love
? And yet, consider what Nabokov said about Humbert: That while he, the author, would condemn his character to hell for his acts, he would allow Humbert, for one day a year, to leave hell and wander a green lane in Paradise,
and that this parole would occur because of the glowing particle of real love he bore Lolita.
Although I find von Rezzori’s words initially repellent and even a little smug, if you rewrite the sentence without the words only and century, I have to agree with them. Lolita is about obsession and narcissistic appetite, misogyny and contemptuous rejection, not only of women, but of humanity itself. And yet. It is also about love; if it were not, the book would not be so heart-stoppingly beautiful. Here is Humbert on finding his runaway sex slave, now married and pregnant at 17:
You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine . . . even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
This is love crying with pain as it is crushed into the thorned corner of a torture garden—but it is still love. Purity of feeling must live and breathe in the impure gardens of our confused, compromised, corrupt, and broken hearts. Love itself is not selfish, devouring or cruel, but in human beings it suffers a terrible coexistence with those qualities; really, with any other vile thing you might think of. These oppositions sometimes coexist so closely and complexly that the lovers cannot tell them apart. This is not only true of sexual love, but also of the love between parents and children, siblings, and even friends. In most people this contradiction will never take the florid form it takes in Humbert Humbert. But such impossible, infernal combinations are there in all of us, and we know it. That Lolita renders this human condition at such an extreme, so truthfully, and yes, as von Rezzori says, convincingly, is the book’s most shocking quality. It is why it will never be forgotten. It is also why no one will ever succeed in describing it fully on a book jacket. But how wonderful that so many have tried.
Introduction
Colorful Misunderstandings, Graphic Misinterpretations
John Bertram and Yuri Leving
Fifty-eight years after Lolita was first published, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel remains firmly in the public consciousness, but more often for its misunderstood subject than for its masterful and dazzling prose. The character of Lolita, in her innumerable pop-cultural refractions (Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the book is primary among them, but there are also a failed 1971 musical; a 1992 Russian-language opera; a second film, from 1997; a 1999 ‘retelling’ from Lolita’s point of view; and a recent one-man show¹), has come to signify something very different from what Nabokov presumably intended. But although she has acquired this misleading advance guard, the novel itself remains as potent as ever. At turns sad and hilarious, deeply disturbing and insanely clever, Lolita is an immensely rich reading experience. Still, if there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita. This book explores why this is so.
Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl has its genesis in Covering Lolita,
Dieter E. Zimmer’s online gallery of close to 200 of the novel’s covers, spanning nearly six decades of its international publishing history.² Though it is intriguing to see them arrayed together, and amusing to follow the choices made by the designers, illustrators, and publishers, it is apparent how few of them ultimately succeeded at communicating the depth and complexity of the novel. Overflowing with powerful, finely wrought imagery, Lolita also strikes with darkness and brutality. Ellen Pifer, editor of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2003), describes it starkly as a threnody for the destruction of a child’s life.
³ It is difficult to think of another book whose cover design has been as fraught with peril.
There are several factors that make Lolita such an instructive case for investigating the art of cover design. First, dozens of existing covers are available for study. Furthermore, Nabokov was not only interested generally in the covers of his books but, in particular, voiced strong opinions about how Lolita’s cover should and shouldn’t appear. (Although, as Zimmer notes in his essay, included in this collection, Nabokov’s opinion evolved over time.) Nabokov wrote with great care and specificity, believing that what may appear to be textual minutiae are often crucial to a full understanding and appreciation. The publisher that chooses for its cover of Lolita a girl with long blond hair or a woman of 21 may not care about such matters. After all, fidelity to the novel’s narrative has not been high on the list of publishers’ concerns.
⁴ This is one reason why misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Lolita still persist. It’s easy to see why a prospective reader, even at this late date, would assume that the titular character is the precocious seductress that her name has popularly (and unfortunately) come to signify.
Duncan White writes that "Lolita has been repeatedly misread on the cover of Lolita, and frequently in a way to make her seem a more palatable subject of sexual desire."⁵ Kubrick’s 1962 film, with its maddeningly indelible image of Lolita (played by the actress Sue Lyon), is arguably the primary source of this interpretation. Ellen Pifer calls it a blatant misrepresentation of Nabokov’s novel, its characters, and its themes. Not only does it betray the nature of the child featured in its pages; it disregards the way that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, comes to terms with his role in ruining her life.
⁶ But however misleading it was, the movie—along with Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film adaption—influences our understanding of the novel to this day, especially since its images have been used unsparingly for decades to promote the book.
Lolita Today
Playboy’s Miss November 2012, Britany Nola, was born in 1991, and the book she loves most, the magazine reveals, is Lolita. One presumes that she has read it and not simply watched Lyne’s film, made before Nola herself was of nymphet age. ([The] man of my dreams is Jeremy Irons,
Nola is quoted as saying in the magazine. Irons, of course, played Humbert in that 1997 movie.)
What makes Nabokov’s novel immortal and its subjects perpetually relevant, especially in popular culture? In recent years there has been an explosion of Lolitamania in pop music. While putting together a Nabokov syllabus for the 2012 semester, a colleague of ours decided on a whim to compile a Spotify playlist of songs that have Lolita
in the title. He gave up after the playlist reached nearly a hundred songs—over five hours of music.⁷ The most commercially successful of the current crop of Lolita-inflected artists is Lana Del Rey (born Lizzy Grant, in 1986), whose 2012 debut album, Born to Die, sold over two million copies worldwide within six months of its release. This American singer-songwriter’s carefully constructed public image is a blend of nymphet and femme fatale transported from the 1950s and 1960s into today. Several of Del Rey’s songs pay homage to Nabokov. Critics have noted that Off to the Races,
for instance, "cleverly combines tropes straight out of Nabokov with those straight outta gangsta rap. . . . ‘Light of your life, fire of your loins,’ Del Rey purrs, just like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, mixing the old-school Hollywood glamour of her vocal with mixtape-ready nods to cocaine and Riker’s Island."⁸ Significantly, Del Rey visually models herself on the Lolita from Kubrick’s movie (or, rather, from its iconic poster, which visually influenced subsequent print editions of Nabokov’s Lolita; 1 and 2).
1 and 2. Lana Del Rey evoking Lolita.
Del Rey appears to be the latest in a line of recent female pop-culture figures whom Meenakshi Gigi Durham described in her 2008 book, The Lolita Effect, as promoting inappropriately hypersexualized clothing to grade-school girls over the world.
Durham examines a long list of Lolitas
of our time, whom she defines as deliberate sexual provocateurs, turning adults’ thoughts to sex and thereby luring them into wickedness, wantonly transgressing our basic moral and legal codes.
⁹ These girls are commonly presented as consenting participants in their own sexual exploitation.
In Chasing Lolita, Graham Vickers writes that Lolita herself was eventually to become an enduring object of interest for reasons that were rarely literary.
¹⁰ Take, for instance, the counterfeit Lolita fashion,
which Vickers argues was a media creation; heart-shaped sunglasses had nothing whatever to do with the Lolita that Nabokov had realized in such precise detail and diligently accoutred with all those faded blue jeans, plaid shirts, tartan skirts, gingham frocks and sneakers.
¹¹ This does not prevent fashion companies and their marketing departments from exploiting imagery indebted to Kubrick’s Lolita in selling their products to a young audience (3 and 4).
3. A 2010 Aldo campaign with a teenage model in suggestive poses.
4. A 2012 Aldo campaign used Kubrick-style Lolita imagery.
Sue Lyon’s heart-shaped sunglasses have become a loose trademark
¹² that signify a young, sexually available girl. Her image is everywhere, in television programs, movies, magazine stories, and especially in advertising. Debra Merskin has noted a number of consumer products named after the literary vixen and celluloid coquette: ‘Lolita Lempicka’ fragrance, ‘Lolita’ leggings in a recent Nordstrom catalogue, or playing on words, ‘Nolita’ hair care products with the subheading ‘no limits, no boundaries.’
¹³ Although Lolita Lempicka is named after a French fashion designer and perfume creator, the link to its literary namesake is implied in its prurient ads (5). Among the latest manifestations of the trend is the Marc Jacobs perfume Oh, Lola! An advertisement for it, featuring a then seventeen-year-old Dakota Fanning, was banned in the U.K. in 2011 (6).
5. An advertisement for Lolita Lempicka fragrance.
6. A 2011 advertisement for the Marc Jacobs Oh, Lola! perfume.
The sexualization of children, particularly of girls, in fashion advertising is disturbing, but here Nabokov’s art continues to be confused with its imitations. Take Hello, Dolly,
a Cosmopolitan fashion feature from 2005. Little-girl-playing-dress-up frocks are rocking fashion right now,
the magazine copy reads. They’re playful and whimsical—with the perfect amount of tongue-in-cheek naughtiness.
The painting hanging above the frolicsome young model features—of course!—butterflies (7).
7. A page from a 2005 Cosmopolitan fashion feature.
Recently, a stage version of Lolita by the American playwright Richard Nelson planned for St. Petersburg—Russia’s second-largest city and Nabokov’s hometown—was canceled over concerns that it could provoke public disorder. The performance was withdrawn following a letter signed by a handful of residents protesting the show and alleging that it ran afoul of a new antipedophilia law.¹⁴ Russians threatened to picket the show if it went ahead, and the theater’s administration succumbed to the pressure. The law, which penalizes the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia among minors,
imposes fines of approximately $16,000 on individuals and $160,000 on organizations found to have breached it. But this absurd Puritanism is hardly a uniquely post-Soviet phenomenon. Only three years ago, a number of popular Penguin titles were pulled from Australia Post retail outlets—including The History of Sexuality, The Delta of Venus, and Lolita—after customers complained.¹⁵ To look at the books’ covers, it was likely the provocative design of the Penguin series that alarmed the consumers more than the books’ content.
By now, the cultural turmoil surrounding Lolita has little to do with Nabokov’s golem-like creation. But authors have been struggling for control over how their work is visualized since at least the early twentieth century, when pictorial editions became popular. And once writers entered the consumer-driven market