The glass motel: personal reflections on the fortieth anniversary of 'Lolita'

Literary Review, Fall, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

I have been charged with racism (for an anti-racist story), with sexism (for an anti-sexist story), with pornography (for a story which sought to find the humanity of a flasher).

Am I a hypocrite then? I wondered. Is it that I should be free to deal with the beasts I find in the forest of my own mind, but also free to blow the whistle on others doing the same thing? Are your beasts less belle than mine?

All I knew for certain was that regardless of what my intellect might wish to argue, it was necessary for me to honor what my heart knew about this. It was wrong, ugly. Perhaps there was a lie of sorts in the writing which made it so ugly, a falseness. For me to try to impose some intellectual standard upon this wisdom of the heart would be, perhaps, a little like Raskolnikov convincing himself he was free to kill the old lady pawnbroker or Ivan Karamozov that he was free to assassinate his father. In Camus's play, Caligula respects only Cherea, to whom he confides the "truth" of existence which drives him: "Men die and they are not happy." To which Cherea responds with the only weapon we have against despair, "I want to live and to be happy."

I packed up the material from this country mailman in a little north Zealand town who would never be my friend and sent it back to him. Perhaps Augustine is right when he says hate the sin, not the sinner. But I wanted nothing more to do with this fellow. I included a brief note begging off from our plans for an interview -- made excuses, I was really very busy, the new book was really not my kind of book, perhaps our paths would cross some other time.

Two days later he phoned me in a fury, demanding that I tell him why I had changed my mind, pressing until I confessed I found the work offensive. I did not wish to read a work in which a blithe description was given of how an adult man managed to succeed in copulating with an eleven-year old child. He was furious and disdainful: Had I read Genet! Had I read Nabokov! Had I read Burroughs! Wasn't I aware that child pornography in the period he was writing about was legal!

I did not wish to debate with him. I felt in some way intellectually wrong, as if choosing between evils. I asked if he had read The Possessed. He had not. I suggested he get hold of an edition which included the suppressed chapter "At Tihon's" with Stavrogin's confession in it. This too was an account of an adult (Stavrogin) who had seduced a child -- in this case a fourteen-year-old girl. The Moscow review which serialized The Possessed had rejected that chapter -- a key to the entire work--as unfit to print. It re-emerged in 1927, preserved from the draft in his wife's hand, although included separately at the back of the book, instead of where it originally was intended to be, following Chapter VIII of Part 2. This chapter explains, as Avrahm Yarmolinsky puts it, "both the involved plot and the perplexing character of Stavrogin."

In the suppressed chapter, Stavrogin goes to visit a wise monk, Tihon, to confess a very great sin. He has seduced a young girl and then, mindful that the girl is devastated by what has passed between them, he sits passively in the next room while she commits suicide. He knows that she is hanging herself, but only sits there, watching a tiny red spider on the leaf of a plant, and allows her to end her life. He is fiercely grieved by his act and has decided that he will publish an account of his sin, will pay to have it printed and distributed throughout the city. The wise priest cautions him not to. You want them to despise you for what you have done, he says to Stavrogin. But they will not hate you, they will only laugh. For so many among them have blithely performed worse deeds themselves.