Clarence Choate Clark

Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., a member of the District of Columbia bar and a relation of Humbert Humbert's lawyer, serves as the editor of the manuscript that becomes Lolita. He is the first voice the reader encounters, writing the Foreword that introduces the "strange pages" of Humbert's confession. Clark's role is that of a gatekeeper and moral commentator: he explains that he received the manuscript under the two titles "Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male" and that its author died of coronary thrombosis in legal captivity on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was to begin. Clark's decision to edit the work was based on a clause in Humbert's will empowering his "eminent cousin" to use discretion in preparing the manuscript for print, a decision possibly influenced by Clark having just been awarded the Poling Prize for a work discussing "certain morbid states and perversions."

Editorial Role and Method

Clark describes his task as simpler than anticipated. He corrected "obvious solecisms" and carefully suppressed "a few tenacious details" that, despite Humbert's own efforts, remained in the text as "signposts and tombstones" indicative of places or persons that taste and compassion would spare. He presents the memoir "intact" otherwise, noting that Humbert's "bizarre cognomen" is his own invention and that the mask through which "two hypnotic eyes seem to glow" had to remain unlifted. He explains that "Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname and that her first name is too closely interwoven with the book's fiber to alter. Clark also provides a few posthumous details about the "real" people: his daughter Louise is a college sophomore, Mona Dahl is a student in Paris, Rita has recently married a Florida hotel proprietor, and Mrs. Richard F. Schiller—Dolores Haze—died in childbed on Christmas Day 1952, giving birth to a stillborn girl in the remote settlement of Gray Star.

Moral and Literary Framing

Clark's foreword is a sustained attempt to position the book for a potentially hostile audience. He argues that the novel deals with situations and emotions that would remain "exasperatingly vague" if expressed through "platitudinous evasions," and that not a single obscene term appears in the work. He defends the inclusion of scenes that might be called "aphrodisiac" by asserting they are "the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis." He acknowledges the cynic's claim that commercial pornography makes the same argument but counters with the learned assertion that Humbert's confession is a "tempest in a test tube," noting that at least 12% of American adult males—a "conservative" estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann—enjoy yearly the special experience Humbert describes. Clark does not glorify Humbert, calling him "horrible," "abject," "a shining example of moral leprosy," and "a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness." Yet he marvels at how Humbert's "singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author."

Ethical Significance

Clark concludes his foreword by asserting that Lolita will become a classic in psychiatric circles as a case history, but that as a work of art it transcends its expiatory aspects. He emphasizes the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader, arguing that in this "poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson" and that "the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac" warn of dangerous trends and point out potent evils. His final sentence is a call to action: "'Lolita' should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world." This framing, signed "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D." from Widworth, Massachusetts, establishes Clark as a figure who simultaneously authenticates, sanitizes, and moralizes the narrative, creating a complex paratextual layer that the reader must navigate.