Literary Criticism: According to TS Eliot, bad writers borrow but great writers steal.
This was a typical piece of sly self-serving on the part of Old Possum. Not only does he forgive himself his many thefts from the mighty dead - The Waste Land bristles with stolen lines - he also claims they are a testament to his greatness. Vladimir Nabokov saw himself as sui generis, a glorious and opulent original who owed nothing to any predecessor, no matter how mighty, with the possible exception of Pushkin. It is ironic, then, that Michael Maar should have chanced upon another, original, Lolita, the creation of a once famous but long-forgotten German journalist, a Lolita who stepped into the world 40 years before the troubled and long-drawn-out birth of her American Schwester.
Michael Maar, who has been described, surely accurately, as "Germany's most gifted literary critic of the younger generation", is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprach und Dichtung and a visiting professor at Stanford University. He made something of a reputation for himself as a literary sleuth with his previous book, Bluebeard's Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann, which delicately led Der Zauberer out of the closet and revealed him as a sentimental and most likely a platonic lover of beautiful young boys. After Death in Venice this was hardly an eyebrow-raising revelation, but Maar traced the homosexual seam in Mann's work with such elegance and finesse that one felt that all along one had been reading a different and altogether less interesting author. Now comes The Two Lolitas, a genuinely original piece of work, startling in its revelations and fascinating, perhaps even a little troubling, in its implications.
The piece of literary twinning which Maar has uncovered makes a story reminiscent of one of Nabokov's own artful concoctions. Heinz von Eschwege came from an "ancient line of Hessian aristocrats", and began his writing career as a poet, no doubt to the dismay of his father, an infantry colonel. While serving as a Naval Artillery reservist in the first World War, Eschwege, writing under the name Heinz von Lichberg, published a collection of stories, The Accursed Gioconda, in 1916, and followed it with some other short books. After the war, however, he stuck mainly to journalism, and made a name for himself in 1929 when he reported on a flight across the Atlantic on the Graf Zeppelin, later turning his account into a bestselling book, Zeppelin Goes Round the World. Lichberg had a way of getting in first which would no doubt have irritated Nabokov intensely: on the Zeppelin trip, as Maar notes, he saw New York more than a decade before the Russian did.
One of the stories in The Accursed Gioconda is called Lolita. Maar prints it as an appendix to his slim book. The first thing to be said about it is that it is a farrago of nonsense. The frame is a dinner in "the beautiful Countess Beate's little empire dining-room". The hostess throws out the name of ETA Hoffmann, that teller of fantastic tales, which provokes "the boyish, sensitive-looking professor" to recount an adventure of his own that he had "towards the end of the last century" when he was a student in a large town in the south of Germany. There he encountered the mysterious bachelor brothers Aloys and Anton Walzer - keep that name in mind - whom he would visit of an evening for a glass of wine.
The student goes to Spain for a holiday, and in Alicante he lodges at a pension run by one Severo Ancosta, whose daughter is the eponymous Lolita: "By our northern standards she was terribly young . . .". He falls in love with her, and she reciprocates.
And while her eyes sought out the image of the flickering moon in the water, like a pleading child she flung her trembling little arms around my neck, leant her head on my chest, and began sobbing. There were tears in her eyes, but her sweet mouth was laughing. The miracle had happened. "You are so strong," she whispered.
Days and nights came and went; the mystery of beauty held them entwined in an unchanging, singing serenity.
Such a love, in such a story, is inevitably doomed. Ancosta confides to the student that the women in his family are cursed. An ancestor, Lola, "the grandmother of Lolita's great-grandmother"- a locution worthy of Humbert Humbert himself - was murdered in a joint effort by two of her lovers "whom she had tormented to the point of insanity", and ever since that event the Ancosta women "only ever had one daughter, and always went insane a number of weeks after the birth of their child", and quickly died. That night the student dreams he sees Lola taunting the two men: "in an instant the two of them had fallen upon her and were strangling her with their long, bony fingers". In the morning, Ancosta tells him that Lolita died in the night. Broken-hearted, he returns to Germany, where he learns that on the morning after the night of Lolita's death, the Walzer brothers "were both found dead in the armchairs by the stove with a friendly smile on their faces".
The thing is absurd, of course, yet the echoes between Lichberg's Lolita and Nabokov's are remarkable: the foreigner arriving in town in search of lodgings, the enchanted child-woman, the forbidden, doomed love, the "golden hot days and silvery melancholy nights", the Spanish touch - Nabokov's Lolita was originally to be named Juanita Dark, and there are references to Carmen sprinkled throughout the novel - and even the death in childbirth, which was Dolores Haze's fate as well as that of the Ancosta women.
So: did Nabokov, who lived in Berlin for 15 years from 1922, read Lichberg's collection of stories and find there the inspiration for his own Lolita? Maar posits three possibilities. The first is that Nabokov was completely unaware of Lichberg and Lolita and that the coincidence is merely that and no more. "Why should it not simply be a splendid, mysterious, even faintly comical example of the way life displays patterns that look deliberate yet are only the caprices of coincidence? In a certain sense this would be a classic Nabokovian theme."
The second possibility is that Nabokov did come across Lichberg's Lolita but later forgot about it, but drew upon it unconsciously when he began to write his own novel - the phenomenon is known as cryptomnesia. This explanation is attractive because it gets rid of a troubling coincidence.
The third possibility is that Nabokov did read Lichberg's story and, Maar writes, "half-inserting, half-blurring its traces, set himself to the art of quotation which Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called 'higher cribbing'" - or, in Eliot's formulation, stealing. Maar prefers this hypothesis, and with good reason. He has nosed out a striking number of echoes from Lichberg elsewhere in Nabokov's oeuvre, most startlingly in his play, The Waltz Invention. In the play, the hero, Waltz - remember the brothers Walzer? - invents a machine which will produce an explosion of unimaginable power. In Atomite, another of the stories in Lichberg's collection - even more awful than his Lolita - the young hero does exactly the same thing. The similarities between The Waltz Invention and Atomite are so many and so striking that they simply cannot be coincidental. Nabokov must have read, and remembered, The Accursed Gioconda.
Whether any of this matters is questionable. Nabokov's Lolita is a classic of world literature, Lichberg's is an inept little squib. Should we care where Nabokov gleaned his inspirations? The Russian master, in his coldly playful way, loved games and tricks and puzzles. Maar believes he has detected a number of sly nods of acknowledgment from Nabokov to poor Lichberg. Might immortality, he wonders, smile on the latter's Lolita in a "hide-out in Nabokov's novel"? Among the many Spanish references in Nabokov's Lolita which Maar calls to our attention is the "pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman" who is one of Dolores Haze's playmates. Maar writes:
No obvious function attaches to her. In the following pages she reappears inconspicuously as Lolita's little Spanish friend. She is the 'lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling', who skips with Lolita. Taking his leave, Humbert flashes a smile to 'the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess'. But who is smiling to whom here - Humbert at a missed chance, or his creator . . . at the lesser Spanish nymphet of the aristocrat von Lichberg? If Nabokov had wanted to hide a small thanks for certain page services, he certainly couldn't have done so more elegantly.
John Banville's novel The Sea is the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction
The Two Lolitas, By Michael Maar Translated by Perry Anderson Verso, 107pp. £12.99