Monsieur Butterfly

There is an incredibly touching section in Carl Zimmer’s recent Times piece about a 1945 paper on butterflies by Nabokov (“Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution is Vindicated,” NYT, 1/25/11). “When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities,” Zimmer writes, “the 8-year-old Nabokov brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift.” Such was his passion for lepidoptery that Nabokov undertook the 1945 paper about the migratory patterns and evolution of Polyommatus blues. Though largely discountenanced by the scientific community in his time, Zimmer remarks, “Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.” Most importantly, in order to pursue his research Nabokov “developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia.” One can’t help but take note of Nabokov’s methodology in the light of the triage he performed in Lolita. Zimmer points out that Nabokov was “the curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard,” and the still shocking pedophilia of Lolita has always been counterbalanced by the picture of the Russian émigré and exile—the gentle scholar whose real themes had nothing to do with perversion. But Nabokov was ultimately as interested in the genitals of people as he was of his beloved butterflies. Flaubert’s famous line, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” applies to Nabokov’s most infamous character, the aging paraphiliac Humbert Humbert. Nabokov was not an eccentric who happened to write one book with an incidentally sexual theme. He was a dirty old man, in love with the pupa, the pudenda and lost youth, and his writing is all the greater for it.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”

Little Death in Venice

Now it’s time to return to a painful subject: the decline of furtive browsing. Back in l992, John Gross wrote The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. But no one has yet produced a history of the decline of the X-rated section at newspaper kiosks, nor has anyone attempted to document the stinging feeling of shame inflicted by the withering glances of prudish news agents, whose forbidden merchandise served as an incubator of male desire. Playboy, Penthouse and even Hustler are still sold in independent drugstores and in most newsstands, but they have become lifestyle magazines that are an accepted feature of mass culture. Back in the heyday of newsstand sex, magazines like Gent and Sir were printed on cheap paper stock, which actually blurred the images of the models, whose lurid poses were rendered with shabby photography. The layout of the shots in the old editions of Gent and Sir had an extemporaneous quality, as if they were taken on the run, in the kind of scruffy motel rooms to which the reader might retreat after being chased away from the newsstand for stealing free looks. The Internet, with its free and easily accessible pornography, has killed one of the great coming-of-age experiences that defined adolescence for the American male. Fallen women in lacey lingerie have been replaced by emboldened vixens whose high-definition sexuality has denuded fantasy of both its privacy and its mystique. Where will the male libido find the guilt and transgression that had previously been the hallmark of tortured adolescence, and incidentally of great works like Lolita and Death in Venice? There was a brief period before the death of porn magazines when a whole new bevy of publications, Cheri, Club and Club International, emerged to carry on the tradition of fetishistic objectification. The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s 2005 film about the famed bondage model who later became a devout Christian (and her Henry Higgins, Irving Klaw), was a swansong for the great age when the fumes of the tobacconist were the madeleine of illicit desire. When Ronald Reagan was a television announcer, he  declared, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.”  In the case of pornography, progress hasn’t improved anything.