Donkin 1 Michael G. Donkin A Nazi Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita In 2014 and 2016, Nathan Abrams published two articles which meticulously seek to document the many ways Stanley Kubrick’s filmic adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita make reference to the Holocaust and Jewishness. While the Holocaust figures fairly prominently in the novel, Kubrick goes far beyond Nabokov’s material, to the point of liberally transforming its references to Jewishness, particularly in the characters of Clare Quilty and Charlotte Haze, whose filmic portrayals have struck audiences, then (in 1962) and now, as Jewish. It is significant that Peter Sellers, who plays Quilty, was himself Jewish, as was Shelley Winters. Yet neither is coded as Jewish in the novel. Abrams admits that, while it would not be possible to conclusively impute intentionality to Kubrick’s choice in representing Quilty and Charlotte as Jewish, he does venture a few reasonable guesses as to why Kubrick might have chosen to do so, whether consciously or unconsciously. Yet the intervention I make here is to argue that, although Abrams is convincing in his reading of Quilty and Charlotte as Jewish, he does not go quite far enough. He leaves out the observation I make in this paper, that Kubrick’s depiction of Humbert Humbert, played by James Mason, is rife with associations to Nazism, especially when we consider his on-screen dynamics with Charlotte and Quilty. In the future, when those dynamics are properly analyzed, we will be in a better position to speculate about Kubrick’s motivations. The historical context in which Lolita the film was produced suggests why allusions to the Holocaust probably would have interested audiences, and why veiled Holocaust reference was timely. First of all, Abrams notes, “The Holocaust was much in the news and in popular culture at precisely the same time as the film was in preproduction” (544 “Jewish American Monster”). Donkin 2 Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Abrams explains, began in 1961, and Eichmann was known to have read Lolita the novel. That same year Judgment of Nuremberg was released, with concentration camp footage, along with the publication of the The Destruction of the European Jews: As a result, secular Jewish intellectuals, particularly in the United States, became much more conscious of the devastation of the Holocaust. Furthermore, they were vocal about it, using the Shoah to mould public opinion, increasingly making explicit comparisons between the Nazi genocide and nuclear mass death in the 1950s and early 1960s. In other words, the Holocaust was in the air, so it was little surprise that Kubrick, himself a Jew, would have worked the topic into the film, if indirectly, even where Nabokov had not done so in his Lolita. This is not to say Nabokov evaded the Holocaust at all. Indeed others have argued that his Lolita does touch on the subject pretty consistently, if in its own way. However, Kubrick’s way of doing so tends to differ, sometimes to the point of reversing Nabokov’s characterization. Firstly, Charlotte Haze is not Jewish in the novel, and Abrams points this out (548), yet she is Jewish in the film. Ditto for Quilty. If anyone is Jewish in Nabokov’s novel it is Humbert Humbert (543). My addition to the conversation Abrams most recently takes up is to show that Kubrick’s Humbert is anything but Jewish; rather, he is coded as Nazi. To begin to make my case, I cite a footnote where Abrams mentions something which I feel is crucial for establishing the Humbert-Nazi connection. Abrams mentions how, in one shot, according to the daily continuity report, “The dialogue off screen is not the dialogue used in the shot—that is only very approximately—Humbert speaking with a German accent, and calling himself Rommel etc. simply to give reaction to Lolita” (550). While Abrams does see this as a Donkin 3 clue that helps strengthen his argument in favor of Kubrick’s Lolita having an underlying German subtext, he leaves it there, without considering how the memory of James Mason’s 1951 role as German World War II general Erwin Rommel affected the way audiences, particularly in 1962, might have read Mason’s role as Humbert. The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951) was a popular success, and though the film was eleven years old, the image of Mason as Rommel, wearing a German uniform, would have been fresh enough in the popular imagination, even if Mason’s Rommel registered as sympathetic to British and American audiences. In Lolita the film’s first scene, wherein Humbert has entered the house of Quilty, with the intention of killing him, there are moments of dialogue which read as playful, though I would also suggest that these should be taken more literally. As Humbert confronts Quilty, we encounter a sequence of references to Jewishness. Humbert: Are you Quilty? Quilty: No, I’m Spartacus. Spartacus was, of course, a Kubrick film, released just two years prior. Abrams tells us that this piece of dialogue “obliquely points to the Jewish actor who played the title role—Kirk Douglas—in a film that can be read as a biblical epic that retells, albeit in an alternative form, the exodus from Egypt, with Spartacus liberating the slaves in a Moses-like fashion” (“Kubrick’s Double” 25). At a point of mounting frustration, in the same scene, Quilty informs Humbert: Donkin 4 You know, I’m not accusing you, Captain, but it’s sort of absurd....the way people invade this house, without even knocking. Abrams is insensible to the possible significance here, seemingly. Here there is the evocation of Nazi violence visited upon Jews in their homes, as well as a suggestion of the plunder done there—and Quilty’s house is very lavish—full of cultural objects. Then there is the phrase “I’m not accusing you, Captain,” which simultaneously recalls the “j’accuse” of the Dreyfus Affair and likens Humbert to a military figure. So when we consider that Mason would already have called up associations, in the minds of audiences, with the German military—from his role as Erwin Rommel—the word “accuse” becomes all the more suggestive. Now, Quilty the Jew assuring Humbert that he means not to accuse him seems the reverse of what we would expect, since during the Dreyfus affair it was the anti-Semites who were being accused of anti-Semitism, with the phrase “j’accuse.” But when Quilty assures Humbert that his house is a gentile’s house, we start to understand the ironic reverse logic which Quilty—in what I assert to be Jewish fashion—deploys. Humbert: You’re going to die. Try to understand what is happening to you. Quilty: You are either Australian...or a German refugee. This is a gentile's house. You’d better run along. Humbert: Think of what you did, Quilty, and think of what is happening to you now. Of this complicated moment, Abrams explains: …when Quilty realizes that the weapon-wielding Humbert intends to harm him, his initial and unconvincing move, in trying to stay alive, as Mizruchi points out, is to make sure Humbert knows he is not a Jew: “You are either Australian or a German refugee. This is a Donkin 5 gentile’s house. You’d better run along.” This attempt to hide his Jewishness, to pass, serves only to underline his Jew- ishness even more, for the use of the term “gentile” is the Jewish term for non-Jews. Only a Jew would think to say this, because "[G]entiles" are not likely to think of tributed to Kubrick: “gentiles don’t know themselves as gentiles. It recalls a statement, athow to worry.” Thus, Quilty inadver- tently reveals that he is a Jew. (25) And revealing that he is a Jew, in this sort of ironical fashion, we might also read Quilty’s earlier denial that he means to accuse Humbert as an accusation of anti-semitism. As for Quilty’s assertion that Humbert is either Australian or a German refugee, Abrams does not view this as important. While bearing in mind the evidence so far compiled in support of Humbert’s associations with Nazism, we would not be supposing too much, I think, to take Quilty’s line a bit more literally—or at least as a positive comparison between Humbert and Nazi Germans. Shifting our attention to another detail from this same scene, I wish to address an interesting clue which Abrams unpacks illuminating Kubrick’s potential intentions behind the painting through which Humbert shoots and murders Jewish Quilty. Notably, this painting, with a bullet hole through it, just happens to appear again as the very last image of the film. Donkin 6 Please permit me to quote at length a passage from Abrams that is too complex and detailed to paraphrase, but which is most informative about the painting Kubrick shows us. Abrams writes, referring to another scholar: Corliss compares Quilty to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty or Bram Stoker's Dracula. Such comparisons inadvertently add to the weight of a reading of Quilty as Jewish. Scholars have noted the implicit, subsurface Jewishness of Dracula, the characterization of whom would have been understood by contemporary audiences. Similarly, if we turn to Sherlock Holmes’s description of Moriarty, in “The Final Problem," there are clear echoes of anti-Semitic descriptions of "the Jew" finding their traces within the text. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.... He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. (102) Donkin 7 Allegedly, Conan Doyle based Moriarty on Adam Worth (1844-1902), a German-born Jewish criminal who operated in America and Britain and was nicknamed “the Napoleon of the criminal world” and “the Napoleon of Crime.” (Worth stole the painting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Thomas Gainsborough (1787), in 1876, a picture bearing strong similarity to that behind which Quilty hides for cover when shot at by Humbert. (34-35) Abrams thus shows that the painting dense with association having to do with anti-semitism— namely, about Jewish evil combined with cunning. This association finds its echo later in the film, when Lo at last reveals the identity of Humbert’s rival, telling Humbert: “He wasn’t like you and me. He wasn’t a normal person. He was a genius. He had a kind of…beautiful Japanese oriental philosophy of life.” That the Jew, almost like an oriental other, has historically been viewed as something of an evil genius—and as Abrams explains elsewhere, a genius with sexually perverse tendencies—helps us begin to understand how this line might be subliminally interpreted in Kubrick’s film, then and now. Lolita’s assertion that Quilty was an exceptional—or, not normal—person also might be interpreted as an echo of an earlier line in Kubrick’s film, wherein Quilty addresses Humbert on the porch at The Enchanted Hunters, revealing himself to be a police officer, then disconcertedly babbles, only—I would argue—meaningfully. Quilty to Humbert: A lot of people think I’m suspicious, especially when I stand on street corners. One of our boys picked me up once. He thought that I was too suspicious standing on the street corner. Tell me, I couldn’t help noticing when you checked in tonight… It’s part of my job, I notice human individuals… and I noticed your face. I said to myself when I saw Donkin 8 you… I noticed your face. I said to myself when I saw you...there's a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw in my life. I believe that these lines—in addition to serving perhaps to make the wary Humbert paranoid— allude to Nazi theories of facial typology. One is reminded of the many well known examples of propagandistic literature that had sought to teach “normal” Germans to spot a Jew by his face. Quilty claims to have a suspicious face, whereas Humbert has the most “normal-looking” face he ever saw. The meaning here is indeterminate, yet I believe, in the context of the case I have been building around the notion of Humbert Humbert-as-Nazi—that such loaded lines cannot easily be dismissed. I would like now to turn to Charlotte Haze’s relation to Humbert in the context of the film. As mentioned before, Shelley Winters who plays Charlotte, was herself a Jew, a fact not lost on Abrams. Of her role in Kubrick’s Lolita, please permit me to quote Abrams again at length: Although there is no indication in the novel that Charlotte is Jewish (548), nor is there any other explicit evidence in the film beyond the fact of Winters’s own ethnicity and previous roles, a series of clues combine to allow us to read her as Jewish. First, Charlotte is the embodiment of the stereotype of the Jewish American Mother (JAM) that began to emerge in postwar American Jewish literature at exactly the same time as Lolita was published. In Herman Wouk’s best-selling novel Marjorie Morningstar produced a stereotype that would be much copied over the coming years. Unlike her pre-Second World War counterpart, the yiddische Mama, who was viewed with affection, the Jewish Mother was not. She was presented as meddlesome, domineering and controlling. Toward the end of the decade, the Jewish mother and her spoiled suburban daughter became the Donkin 9 objects of literary ridicule, as evidenced by Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, a template which, in many ways, fitted Charlotte and Lolita Haze. According to Susan Bordo, Charlotte is “the monster of the story.” Like the JAM [Jewish American Mother], Charlotte is pretentious, irritating, bossy, “a behemoth mom.” Charlotte is a baalebusteh who cooks and kibitzes, nagging her daughter incessantly, and henpecking Humbert, as her husband, into desperation and longing for a means of escape. In return, Humbert describes her as a “brainless ba-ba,” a designation attributed to his first wife in Nabokov’s novel but attached to Charlotte in the film. (“A Jewish American Monster” 548) My purpose in quoting so much here is to underscore the unambiguously—at the time—Jewish portrayal of Charlotte in the film, something we would not recognize today. That members of the intelligentsia who wrote reviews of Lolita, as Abrams notes, readily understood Kubrick’s Charlotte to be Jewish (553) is significant, since her coding as Jewish, along with Sellers’, produces an atmosphere where the maybe more subtle coding of Humbert Humbert as Nazi is set in relief. But without such a backdrop, the Nazi references would be practically meaningless. With it, a dynamic is created between Humbert and Charlotte and Quilty that calls to mind not only historical anti-Semitism but more particularly the Holocaust. Additionally, the negative associations around the Jewish American Mother stereotype, making her the “monster of the story” have the interesting effect of making the audience complicit in her death. It is interesting to consider the scene where Charlotte and Mason lie together in bed, the former hoping to bring about an amorous moment. As Humbert’s tumescence noticeably and suddenly subsides, Charlotte whistfully declares “c’est le vie.” Meanwhile Humbert has turned away Donkin 10 from her, staring off, past the bedside table which happens to have a loaded revolver on it—the gun with which he will eventually kill Quilty. Let me quote from the script. Charlotte, referring to Humbert’s lapsed member: Darling, you’ve gone away. Humbert: Just a minute, darling, I’m following a train of thought. Charlotte: It doesn’t matter. C’est la vie. …Am I on that train? Humbert: Yes. The image from the film is striking, and reads quite sinisterly. As, Abrams notes: “The proximity of the gun, and Humbert’s assumed thoughts, suggest a connection between trains and killing, what Cocks refers to as the “association with Nazi mechanics of murder that would show up in The Shining” (552 “Jewish American Monster”). However, Abrams does not note that it will very soon be Humbert’s intention to murder Charlotte, and this becomes important in light of Humbert’s associations with Nazism, already established by now in the film. Although Humbert ultimately decides he is unable to shoot Charlotte, the wish was there, and it is notable that the only homicidal urges on Humbert’s part known in the film are connected to characters who would have read as Jewish, and still do. Donkin 11 And let us, lastly, not forget that moment where Lolita responds to Charlotte’s chiding with a performative “Seig heil.” Her appearance in this shot is chilling, if fleeting. The blond, Aryan-looking child glibly salutes her mother in exasperation. Charlotte, addressing Lolita, referring to Humbert: “He is a writer and he is not to be disturbed.” Lolita: Seig heil.” End scene. The very next shot, though, is a protracted one of James Mason’s face. I would say this is rather suggestive, as the juxtaposition makes us associate Lolita’s language with Mason’s face, which audiences would then have still associated with the Nazi figure Rommel, played by Mason a little over a decade earlier. The dynamics between Humbert and Charlotte are complicated, sometimes with reversals that seem to make Charlotte the Nazi, and thus Humbert not the Nazi, to the extent that his desires are opposed to her own in every way. Beyond Lolita’s Hitler salute to Charlotte, there is the subtle allusion to concentration camps noted by Abrams, when Charlotte proudly informs Humbert, following the salute and the protracted shot of his face, that Lolita will be sent away to a summer camp. According to Abrams, As if responding to the gesture, in the scene that immediately follows, Charlotte informs Humbert that she has been “too liberal” and is send- ing Lolita off “long-distance” to a “camp” for “isolation.” The phraseology here, through its close juxtaposition with the Donkin 12 direct invocation of Hitler, uncannily echoes the Nazis’ euphemistic language (“final solution,” “solution possibilities,” “special treatment,” “cleansing operation,” “deportation,” “displacement,” “resettlement,” and “evacuation”). (“A Jewish American Monster 551) I would argue that Charlotte becoming the Nazi here is merely an irony, perhaps meant to draw attention to her obliviousness about what will soon befall her. Of course this evokes the way that many assimilated German Jews apparently never saw the Holocaust coming. Charlotte herself, after all, is an assimilated Jew. Abrams discusses how throughout the film Charlotte is desperately trying, but failing, to pass by masking her Jewish roots through her failing mimicry (a faux posh accent, use of words, intellectual/ cultural airs and graces), but it is the very excess of her mimicry that gives her away, revealing her failure to pass, and echoing the Jewish saying that “Jews are like everybody else, only more so.” (550) In this light it would seem that Charlotte’s Jewish portrayal borders on burlesque in ways not necessarily apparent to us today. Her eagerness to pass as gentile—think of when she informs Humbert on first meeting him, “Culturally, we’re a very advanced group...with lots of good Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Scotch stock…”—is at once pitiful and tragic. That Lolita likens her to Hitler, and that Kubrick has Charlotte send Lolita to an isolation camp only bespeaks her desperate desire to pass as gentile, just as Quilty comically expressed his own wish to pass as gentile when Humbert had come for him. My analysis about why Kubrick seems, unconsciously or not, to have created the dynamic between the three characters that he did at this point is utterly provisional. In any case, I think when we read Humbert as Nazi and Charlotte and Quilty as Jewish, we are reminded of the un- Donkin 13 comfortable dynamics of historical anti-Semitism as well as of how that played out in the Holocaust. George Steiner has his own theory about why the Germans tried to eradicate the Jews once and for all. He believes it was because the pressure of attaining perfection which the Jewish god demanded of them had become too much, and the Jews were blamed for bringing monotheism to the world. Something like this might be correct or it might not be, and Kubrick himself was surely invested in understanding why Jews had always been so persecuted. But Humbert’s extreme paranoia in the novel, translated onto the screen, offers a better clue. I think it is possible Kubrick saw something in Humbert’s paranoia which reminded him of the problem of anti-Semitism, and so he made Quilty Jewish rather than implicitly gentile (Swiss, like Humbert’s uncle, Gustave Trapp). He may have felt that Humbert’s paranoia about Quilty was similar to the gentile’s paranoia surrounding the notion of the Jew. To all too hastily close, allow me to quote from Nabokov’s publisher James Laughlin from his memoir of the notoriously anti-Semitic Ezra Pound: Pound’s extreme anti-Semitism in the 1940s put a severe strain on my affection for him. But I came to understand his obsession with more charity when Dr. Overholser, the head psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths Hospital, told me, “You mustn’t judge Pound morally, you must judge him medically.” He explained that Ezra was paranoid and that anti-Semitism is a recognized element in paranoia. Pound could not control himself. (Laughlin 15) Donkin 14 Works Cited Abrams, Nathan. “A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita (1962).” 49.3 (2015): 541-56. Web. Abrams, Nathan. “Kubrick’s Double: Lolita’s Hidden Heart of Jewishness.” Cinema Journal 55.3 (2016): 17-39. Web. Laughlin, James. Pound as Wuz : Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1987. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Appel, Alfred. The Annotated Lolita. Rev. and Updated, 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard's Castle : Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. Print. T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures ; 1970.