`Fire of My Loins'--With a Douse of Water

The Enchanter

By Vladimir Nabokov

G.P. Putnam's Sons; 127 pages; $16.95.

DURING THE EARLY years of the Second World War, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a short story called "The Enchanter," describing a cynical jeweler's predatory lust for an enticing violet-eyed girl of 12. Dissatisfied with the piece, Nabokov abandoned the manuscript. But he continued to ponder over the theme, finally returing to it 10 years later when he wrote Lolita.

By this time, "The Enchanter" had changed into the complex tale of the love affair between the brooding Humbert Humbert and his spunky nymphet. As Nabokov put it, the original short story "had, in secret, grown the claws and wings of a novel."

The Enchanter, however, never quite gets off the ground. Rediscovered by Nabokov, published posthumously by his son Dmitri who also translated it from the Russian, the story is merely a pale version of the great novel. In the introduction, Nabokov characterizes "The Enchanter" as a separate work. Its premise and plot, however, so resemble those of Lolita that, despite ourselves, we search the story for traits of the novel--the same multifaceted richness of character, the same playful verve of language.

We pan for gold and come up with a few weakly glinting bits. The Enchanter offers us flaccid auxiliary characters and a descriptive style which--although recognizably Nabokov's in its wit and lilt--becomes self-indulgently poetic and sinks into monotony.

Like Lolita, The Enchanter is about a middle-aged bachelor whose passion for a blithely seductive adolescent drives him to desperate, hapless schemes to gain access to her. His obsession carries him so far as to marry the child's unappetizing mother and to put up daily with her drabness and phlegm.

But the characters of mother and daughter are completely overshadowed by the story's half-mad protagonist, serpentile in his stealthy pedophilia. The mother, meanwhile, is reduced to the stereotype of the hypochondriac nag, while the daughter--behind the violet mist of the poetic physical description--is no more than a cute, slightly buck-toothed kid on roller skates.

Vacuous and innocent, she lacks the flirtatious savvy of the brassy Lol, who trots about with a swing in her hips, pink lipstick on her lips, and who, at her young age, really knows how to lick a lollypop.

The mother and daughter are flat characters partly because they are not given voices. The Enchanter lacks the squabbles and banter which pepper the pages of Lolita. While the child in The Enchanter remains for the most part mute, Lolita utters vulgar taunts and slangy witticisms. She knows that she is a "bad, bad girl. Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching."

ON THE WHOLE, the style of The Enchanter is somewhat disappointing. It has a lyrical grace, but the poetic descriptiom gets out of hand. The narrative is pumped with sweeping fetishistic passages. Told in the third person, it lacks the directness of Humbert's first-person narrative.

In his essay, "On a book entitled Lolita," Nabokov explains how the novel represents "my love affair...with the English language." Having left off writing in his mother tongue, Nabokov, speaking through Humbert, toys with the American idiom, pinpoints his images with le mot juste.

Of course, as a short novel The Enchanter can not be expected to have the same artistic complexity as Lolita. Despite its shortcomings, there is much to admire in this piece of prose. Nabokov's unmistakable flair comes across clearly in Dmitri Nabokov's sensitive and painstaking translation. When he spoke at Harvard last Thursday, Dmitri mentioned an "inviolable contract" which existed between the father as author and the son as translator, and which continued to exist even after the father's death.

Though at times excessive, the story's poetic description often creates a compelling sense of sensual beauty as seen through the devouring eyes of the enchanter. Pulsing with lust, he watches the child play hopscotch:

...her blazing arms crossed on her chest, her misty head inclined, emanating a fierce chestnut heat, losing, losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze.

In addition, the protagonist's impressions are spiced with cynical wit. Unable to perceive his bulbous new bride as his "wife," he refers to her simply as "the person," a "cumbersome behemoth" who stares at him intently with her "two eyes and wart."

Especially inventive are Nabokov's condensed metaphors, like those in the poetry of imagists such as Ezra Pound. Eerie images flash through the half-aware mind. In the midst of a frenzy of frustrated desire, the protagonist fleetingly notes that the morning's newspaper is dated the 32nd. When the sleepy little girl is led into the hotel, she watches a "doubling cat" through her blurred vision.

At one point, while courting the child's mother, the enchanter sees a glimmer of his fate "silently indicated to him by what looked like a strange naill finger." Sometimes remote, sometimes sinister, sometimes humorous, these imagist puzzles are strangely evocative, as well as tantalizing to decipher.

THOUGH HE IS no Humbert, the chilling "enchanter" is engaging in his own right. Like other protagonists in Nabokov's work, the precise, thinlipped jeweler is probably mad, as he indulges more and more in his wolvish fantasies. Yet, at the same time, his constant introspection reveals a natural need for self-justification and an odd paternal longing.

Unwillingly, we find ourselves developing sympathy for a childmolester, as we follow the highly suspenseful course of events which we know is leading him inexorably towards disaster. The enchanter's plight culminates in a surrealistic scene of warped eroticism.

FATE, CRUEL AND derisive, always seems to trap the errant. In the fiction of Nabokov, this fate is the will of the author who is empowered by his art to create his characters and coolly plan out their destinies. He operates them like marionettes, then drops their strings and watches them collapse. Thus he deals with the enchanter.

The interweaving of some of these themes, the webs of imagery, the elegant prose with its pricks of irony and cadences of poetry, all make The Enchanter a worthwhile read. Admittedly it is one of the author's lesser works, a weak prototype of Lolita.

But The Enchanter is hardly the "dead scrap" that Nabokov called it when he first wrote it in Paris. The short novel has the appeal of the author's distinct style. It demonstrates his method of patterning fiction which, in Nabokov's words, combines "the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way."