Hello Again: James Mason and "Lolita"

It’s been over a year since I’ve written in this blog. I wanted it to be a dream journal at first but it evolved from there into writing exercises and memories. Now I’d like to revive it and use it for those purposes as well as book and movie reviews.

For a good while I’ve poured my energies into my blog on the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture and the problems with the governance there that have escalated over the last year and a half. If anyone is interested, take a look at http://www.brooklynethics.blogspot.com/.

Here, I want to keep it more personal and varied in topic.

My most recent craze has been collecting the films of the late James Mason. I “discovered” him almost two years ago when I attended a book discussion group at the library. The book we discussed was Lolita and we watched the 1962 film starring James Mason, Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers. I’d seen the movie before but this time I came away from it with a tremendous crush on James Mason.

First of all, I’ve read “Lolita” many times since I was a teenager myself. Even before I fully understood the story and the emotions behind it I was fascinated by Nabokov’s lush writing style. He made the story of a pathetically twisted man into what’s been described as the greatest love story of the 20th century.

James Mason gave a terrific performance and brought the warped soul of Humbert Humbert to life. He succeeded in making me feel sorry for the criminal, the despoiler of little girls. Although, certainly, Lolita was no innocent, and actively solicited his attentions, he was the adult and he should have shown restraint. And yet, except for the murder of Quilty, he comes off as if he is the victim of an underaged femme fatale who took advantage of him!

By the end, when she sent him away and remained loyal to her husband, even though they were living in deep poverty, Humbert was so pitiful that if he hadn’t rushed off to shoot Quilty I would have felt sorry for him.

At the book discussion, everyone was quick to condemn Humbert. I was the only one who had a word to say in his defense, although, admittedly, if I had a daughter and he put his hands on her, I might have shot him myself. But I remembered a situation when I was a teenager and at summer camp, that seemed related.

The summer I was fourteen, I attended a summer camp for “gifted” children. We had a great deal of freedom and chose our daily activities as if they were college classes. By the time we were senior campers at fourteen we had a number of free periods during the day during which we were unsupervised and could roam the campus at will.

A girl in my cabin, Laurie, had an affair with a 24 year old counselor. I don’t remember his name anymore. I do remember that we all knew about it, because she didn’t even understand that it should have remained hidden. When she had a pregnancy scare a couple of the counselors were going to sneak her into a nearby town for an abortion. Fortunately, she wasn’t pregnant after all, but her pregnancy scare was so well known that when we wrote our “last will and testament” to be read aloud on the final evening of camp, some witty person left Laurie “first period.” I remember laughing at that and seeing the camp director flush scarlet. Whether he knew the real implication or not is a mystery but he closed down the camp after that season and Laurie’s sleeping with a counselor may have been a good part of the reason.

The counselor, whatever his name was, was just as sleazy as Humbert. One night as we all sat on the hood of a truck, stargazing, he tried to fondle my breasts. At the time, I didn’t understand the implications of an adult fooling with an underaged girl, and my indignant objection was that I would tell Laurie on him for trying to cheat on her!

The point, though, is that Laurie didn’t believe she was being molested. She was flattered and thrilled that an attractive older man was paying her so much attention. Did she change her mind years later and decide she’d been violated? If so, she would certainly be justified. But if not, she may have been spared the psychological damage that goes with being a victim. If she maintained the illusion that she simply had a fling with an older man, then in her mind there would have been no offense against her, and she would not need therapy to cure her of the emotional wounds.

So my statement to the discussion group was, if Lolita didn’t view herself as a victim but saw herself as the seducer, she might not have been harmed. Since she wasn’t innocent to begin with (and was in fact cheating on Humbert with Clare Quilty all those years), he may have molested her but he did not steal her innocence. His crime was stealing her freedom, when he denied her the right to go out on dates and to parties like other teenagers.

But, if he’d granted permission, she just would have seen more of Quilty. So my conclusion was that although Humbert was mentally guilty of molesting Lolita, in fact he wasn’t the one who despoiled her, and he really just deprived her of extra time with the other pervert. Of course, this made me the pariah of the group as they were all ready to draw and quarter Humbert.

Ever since I saw “Lolita” that time, I became fascinated with James Mason and decided I had to see his other films as well. So I began collecting them, and joined a yahoo group devoted to James Mason fans. On that group I met a woman who is a devout James Mason fan, and she has sent me quite a few DVD’s of his various films, along with audio CD’s of James Mason reading Robert Browning’s poetry and excerpts from, you guessed it, “Lolita.”

I’ve now seen probably 20 or more James Mason films and will review them here, along with some books I’ve recently read. If there are any other James Mason fans reading this, the yahoo group is located at http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/jamesmasonclub/.