Lolita was obviously based on a young boy, Francis says, and Humbert Humbert was a homosexual in the mode of Aschenbach of Death in Venice. Nabokov himself may well have been a homosexual, which would account for the homophobia in his fiction. But Nabokov hadn’t the honesty to confront his homosexuality, in the tradition of Marcel Proust, who created his fictional Albertine, a gay man’s notion of a girl, in Remembrance of Things Past. There is a reason, a very good reason, Francis says, why Poe’s marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin was a mariage blanc. Sexual relations with a girl so
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