The first Lolita

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 . . .

[From the TLS, full story not displayed]