Wednesday
Numerous outlets are reporting on plausible allegations that Donald Trump forced a thirteen-year-old to commit fellatio (and then hit her when she bit his penis), and that Trump’s Justice Department has been attempting to cover-up the FBI investigations into the matter. Given that the president appears in the Epstein files thousands of times and that he visited the dressing rooms of teenage beauty contestants—not to mention his rape of E. Jean Carroll—there’s every reason that Trump not only knew what Epstein was up to but participated in some of his abominations.
I find pedophilia so painful that I have long shied away from literature that deals with it. When I was enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course in the summer of 1973, an editor gave us Robert Roper’s novel Royo County and asked us how we would respond if it came over our desk. I only remember a scene in which a man forces a girl to give him a blow job, which so appalled me that I called the book “filth,” thereby offending the editor. I failed to see that the novel is otherwise masterfully written.
When I look back at a revulsion verging on hysteria, I wonder if it has anything to do with a Frenchman running his hand up and down my leg when I was 13 and watching Gary Cooper’s The Unconquered with my brothers in a Paris theater. I didn’t know what was happening, just that I felt extremely uncomfortable. We got up and changed seats and fortunately nothing further transpired.
A casual treatment of pedophilia by Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates caused me to turn against an author whose counterculture irreverence I had previously enjoyed (especially Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All). In this novel, however, I concluded that Robbins had broken one taboo too many and found myself questioning my former attraction. It was like watching the rebellious sixties degenerate into the decadent seventies.
No work has caused me as much distress as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Because it enjoys such a high reputation, it was one of those novels I felt I should read, but time and again I fled after only a few chapters. Only when I team-taught a “Madness and Literature” course with a psychologist did I finally finish it.
Returning to it following the Epstein files leads me to wonder whether the pedophile used the novel as a training manual. Not only did Epstein name his plane The Lolita Express but it appears that he used the narrator’s tactics to keep his victims off balance, which is easier to do when one is dealing with children. In Humbert Humbert’s case, he retrieves Lolita/Dolores from her boarding school without informing her that her mother has died and then keeps her unsettled by moving around the country. He also finds ways to make her dependent, alternating gifts with threats. The rape occurs after the 12-year-old, feeling alone in the world, surrenders to her captor:
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments—swooners;, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Notice how he turns the tables on her in the following scene. The child, not the adult, is in the wrong:
Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us suppose they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree sodomy, depending on the technique, and the maximum penalty is ten years. So I go to jail. Okay I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public Welfare—which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go there, Lolita—my Lolita, this Lolita, will leave her Catullus and go there, as the wayward girl you are. In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old men?
Humbert Humbert observes, “By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo.”
I’ve written about how, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s students identified with Dolores and saw Humbert Humbert as the mullahs who were ruling their lives. To put Trump and Epstein in that category sounds about right.
I’ve recently read one other book about a pedophile, a satisfactory mystery in that justice is dispensed at the end. In Linwood Barclay’s Find You First (major spoiler alert), the villain is a mixture of Epstein and Elon Musk. The Musk side is obsessed with what he sees as his genius DNA and the Epstein side with young girls and influence peddling, so it’s very satisfying to see a teenager and a young woman escape from the villain’s New York mansion and ruin his life.
I was amazed at how satisfying it was to see violence meted out to predatory men. It clued me into how angry I have been.
