"It was artistic to be these girls..."

Posted early Wednesday morning, February 3, 2021.

Detail from “Il suonatore di liuto (The Lute Player)”, 1612/1620, by Orazio Gentileschi. The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

“...and to be us, in love with them.”

I didn’t need to have read “Lolita” in high school to see and think along these lines, and I hadn’t read it, and wouldn’t get around to it until just before I went off to graduate school, and I’m glad. It meant I saw these girls as themselves and gazed at them through my own eyes and not through Humbert Humbert’s. At least, I’d have thought, to the degree I thought instead of felt, I was seeing them as they were and not as I wanted them to be and I looked at them through my own unfiltered eyes and what I saw was what there really was to see. But these girls, many of whom were my friends, two of whom were my girlfriends, were artistic and were not only worthy of having love poems written to them and of being painted by Italian masters, they wrote poetry and painted and drew and played musical instruments, and, not simply by the way, got better grades than I did...

Across the street, past the Gellatlys’ house, and past their back yard, was the house of my friend Don. He and I read “Lolita” at about the same time. Just as Humbert pleaded his love for Lolita before the “winged gentlemen of the jury,” we expounded to each other on our love for various beautiful girls at Hudson High School. These girls were like Lolita, with their field-hockey sticks, and book bags, and scuffed knees on the school bus. Lolita starred in a famous, best-selling book by a high-class foreign author. Therefore, the girls who rode Bus 8 with us were themselves worthy of the loftiest regard—worthy of having love poems written to them, or of being painted by the old-time Italian painters whose names we didn’t remember from trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Suddenly it was artistic to be these girls, and to be us, in love with them. The world seemed all in a sweat over this fictional girl, Lolita, who looked and talked and acted like girls we got to be next to, and hopelessly far from, every day.

---Ian Frazer, “Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me”, in the December 20, 2020 issue of the New Yorker.