three children of the fifties: holden, lolita, malcolm
by Douglas Messerli
J. D. Salinger The
Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little Brown, 1951)
J. D. Salinger Nine
Stories (Boston: Little Brown, 1953)
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955)
James Purdy Malcolm
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Company, 1959)
Lolita, we discover, is more sexually experienced than she pretends. But one has to recognize her encounter with young Charlie in Camp Q as the sexual grappling of a young teenage girl as opposed to the perverted if comical “flutters and probes” of Humbert Humbert, the sexed-starved adult. Lolita is precocious and even appears to have significant sexual awareness, but as many parents know, that is the self-recognized power of girls on the verge of becoming women. I recall my friend Charles Bernstein bemoaning the fact that his teenage daughter, Emma, dressed daily in outfits that at one time our ancestors might have described as undergarments. “We fear for her as she travels the various subways on her way to school. She doesn’t understand that what she sees as provocative in a good sense, might provoke behavior in others that she would find undesirable—and dangerous.” Performer and poet Fiona Templeton, responded that she too, at the same age, had dressed quite outrageously. “It’s the existence of their innocence that allows the young to take outrageous chances.” So too, I suggest, must we comprehend Lolita’s seeming sexual advances. She may look like an experienced seducer to Humbert, but her mind is still trapped in the world of comic books and “lurid movie magazines.”
Malcolm, of James Purdy’s lesser-known novel, has so little sense of self and awareness that it is almost pointless to describe him as an innocent. Like a cocoon enveloped in its protective silkiness, Malcolm is in a state of waiting, the “boy on the bench,” whose sexual force lies outside, in the presence of Mr. Cox (pun intended). And it is only when Cox sends the boy on his way through the maze of psycho-sexual adult encounters that he discovers anything outside himself. Of all three characters, Malcolm is the most extreme, beyond innocence because there is so little awareness of anything else. Unlike Holden, Malcolm can feel little disappointment, only a vague sense of loss from his father’s disappearance. Nearly narcoleptic, he attends to new “friends,” Estel Blanc, Kermit, Laureen, Mr. and Madame Girard, Eliosa and George Leeds, and others with a kind a vague comprehension, often falling to sleep in the midst of their “lessons.”
Innocence, accordingly, is the driving force that binds these three, and
which makes them so attractive to adults. And it is, of course, that very
quality, along with the beauty of their youth, that makes them so appealing to
the predators they encounter along their paths. We can almost forgive Holden’s
grandiose sense of being betrayed when he recounts, as he does late in the
novel (in an admission I had forgotten from reading the book as a young man, at
almost the same age as Holden) that the sexual advances of his former school
teacher Mr. Antolini are not the first he has encountered. “When something
perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of
stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.”
Although we know that Holden is given to some exaggeration, the fact
that he has encountered such sexual advances several times before is more than
shocking. The world these three novels present of the 1950s is far from the
presentation of the mythical clean-cut and tightly-knit nuclear family so often
represented as the generational image.
We need hardly even speak of Lolita, for her story is infamous. Even if we see
her, as Nabokov has himself, tongue-in-cheekly suggested, as a picture of a
young American debauching old Europe,” it is obvious that Lolita is an abused
child. Humbert Humbert himself admits his guilt for having stolen Lolita’s
youth and—through her counter-reactions against him—perhaps even her life. As
Humbert recalls from standing on a hill and hearing transparent sounds from a
small village:
What I heard was but the
melody of children at play, nothing but that, and
so limpid was the air that
within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and
minute, remote and magically
near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could
hear now and then, as if
released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter,
or the crack of a bat, or
the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too
far for the eye to
distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood
listening to that musical
vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of
separate cries with a kind
of demure murmur for background, and then I
knew that the hopelessly
poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side,
but the absence of her voice
from that concord.
As Fiona Templeton suggested, perhaps the truly innocent are sometimes
protected by their own lack of recognition of evil. That is certainly what
protects Malcolm from the various abuses he undergoes. Madame Girard wants
Malcolm, not so much as a sexual object, but as a social one, a member of her
traveling entourage of self-congratulators. Mr. Girard wants him as a son.
Recognizing that such a total innocent can offer him, in his world of “fag
décor,” very little, the undertaker Estel Blanc demands that the boy visit him
when he becomes older. Although Malcolm shares beds with various black jazz
performers in George and Eliosa’s house, no overt sexual action seems to take
place. No, Malcolm’s predator is of his own age, “a contemporary” as James
Purdy puts it, a kind praying mantis who through her intense demand of sex and
the never-ending quantities of alcohol she provides sucks the very life from
him. Malcolm is most certainly abused, but not by those of an older generation,
simply by one more experienced.
All three of these books of the 1950s, accordingly, are very much
centered on issues of innocence and experience. But they also reveal something
much deeper: the inherently destructive forces behind our collective desire for
that innocence. These three children, all products of the baby boom of the
heady postwar years, are destroyed by the very forces from which their parents
sought to protect them—or at least sought through
their children to protect American culture from: disillusionment,
debauchery, violent death—you know, all those things which “The Greatest
Generation” (as Tom Brokow has dubbed them) saw themselves as fighting against.
Ironically, of course, the very isolation in which they enwrapped their
families, the very lies and myths they told their children and themselves in
order to protect, and the very material objects they heaped upon themselves and
families to better their world created the situations of children such as these
three, who are unable to grow, to act, to think, even to experience things in
the world around. Americans love the idea of being innocent, but as Blake and
numerous authors have made clear, innocence is often the most dangerous of
forces. As early as 1850, a century before Lolita,
Charles Dickens was amused and a bit disgusted by the American riposte: “Well,
we’re still a young nation.” There comes a time when one has to recognize that
childhood is over, Dickens suggests. I think Graham Greene expressed it best in
connection with his novel The Quiet
American: “You can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you
can do is control or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.” If
innocence has, in part, protected these children, it has also done them in,
destroyed them in the end.
If one can see Holden as an aged child-man, one can just as easily
imagine him, like another Salinger figure, Seymour Glass, on the seashore with
a young girl who reminds him of his beloved sister, before going indoors to
shoot a bullet through his head. Mrs. Richard Schiller, nee Dolores Haze—better
known to readers as Lolita—escapes the clutches of Humbert only to face what
promises be a dreary marriage with a beer-guzzling inarticulate “lamb”: “arctic
blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin.” Nabokov, perhaps out of
pity, kills her off. She dies in childbirth, it is reported, long before the
supposed publication of Humbert’s recounting of their life, published
purportedly in “the first years of 2000 A.D.”
Of Malcolm—a figure at the end of this decade, who, as I have pointed
out, has been so encapsulated in the protective shell of childhood that he has
nothing about which to be disillusioned and so little sense of existence that
he literally sleepwalks through his life—one can question whether or not he
really existed; both coroner and undertaker claim no one was buried in his
casket. Purdy seems to suggest that innocence so severe actually consumes the
individual. Whatever the case, what these three children represented of their
generation’s American dreams evaporated before they had a chance to take root.
Los
Angeles, August-September 2004
Reprinted
from The New Review of Literature,
II, no. 2 (April 2005).
