Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (37 page)

If Nabokov was daring Americans to venture out of their comfort zone to tackle the novel, American publishers were not ready to meet that challenge. Viking rejected it in February 1954; Simon & Schuster declined it in March. After Nabokov offered his “timebomb” to James Laughlin, the publisher of
Sebastian Knight
, once more that fall, Laughlin responded that the book was “literature of the highest order” but agonized over the risks involved.
⁴³
Doubleday’s Jason Epstein and Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Young also politely declined.

Nabokov took standard page-turning genre conventions—detective stories, travelogues, romances—and shot each one point-blank, delivering the most corrupt love affair in American literature. The whodunit is transformed into a who’ll-get-it. The traditional travelogue becomes an extended kidnapping. But for all the lofty strains of the violin sonata that Humbert concocts to serenade suspicious readers into complacency, he cannot create romance from rape.
⁴⁴

Nabokov had no illusions about what an explosion the novel would make, or the dilemma it would present to readers. If we sympathize with Humbert in any meaningful way, we are monsters. If we read the book as a catalogue of perversity, we are voyeurs. Woven throughout are innumerable comic moments, juxtaposed against the handful of sober scenes in which we see Lolita clearly, as when she delights in trying on new clothes or when she walks down the street talking with a friend about the worst part of death being that you die alone.
⁴⁵

With
Pnin
, readers would quickly recognize that Timofey Pnin’s drama unfolded over a tapestry of the recent past. Even the humorously mistaken detention of Pnin as an anarchist at Ellis Island knits the war into his story, without ever letting it dominate the action. His memories of Mira Belochkin are suppressed into the margins, forced there not just by the narrator but by Pnin himself, who cannot imagine how he will stay sane unless he distances himself from his past and the suffering of the dead. Epic tragedy—in this case the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust—is made real only in tiny, discrete glimpses.

The past cannot be escaped; the past shapes the present. In
Sebastian Knight
, V. pursues his brother and seeks to close the gap between them before it is too late, indirectly memorializing a beautiful family in Berlin before the lives of all Jews in Berlin will be changed forever. (In Nabokov’s life, of course, the book became a double memorial; Sergei died outside the story just as Sebastian did inside it.)

Again and again, Nabokov made use of real-world history that illuminated the lives of his invented characters via events whose repercussions continued to lay out in the very world in which his readers lived. Despite his insistence as a professor that students should not expect to gain historical information from the work of Austen or other brilliant authors, he had pointed out this very history in his own teaching, referencing Austen’s nod to the slave plantations of Antigua in
Mansfield Park
and quizzing students about the specific details that anchored a given book in its time and place.
⁴⁶
In Nabokov’s world, history that undergirded the surface story and preserved the past for future discovery was an inextricable part of transcendent literature.

History lurked in
Lolita
, too, shedding light on the most pressing matters of Nabokov’s day and going to the heart of the principles that were his father’s legacy. But almost all of that history, the moral center of
Lolita
, went unnoticed.

American publishers would not touch
Lolita
. Not only had Edmund Wilson’s
Hecate County
been banned in New York, but during Nabokov’s first year at Cornell, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the decision. Publishers were not seeking the losses that would come from printing books only for them to be seized and destroyed.

Nabokov began to realize that he might have to send
Lolita
out into the world under his own name. If it were not pornographic, one editor argued, why would he need to hide—especially when hiding would only advance the argument that it should be banned? Nabokov began to despair, but Edmund Wilson’s newest wife Elena felt certain
that
Lolita
would find a publisher if Nabokov would look for one in Europe, where houses would not have to contend with censorship and U.S. Supreme Court cases.
⁴⁷

Elena Wilson turned out to be prescient. When Nabokov’s agent in France met Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press that April, the publisher had just brought out work by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Girodias had shown a willingness to print literature in English that other houses deemed too illicit or pornographic, despite the high quality of the writing.
Lolita
seemed a good fit, and weeks later Girodias made an offer, which Nabokov quickly accepted, despite his family’s warnings about the terms of the contract and his new publisher’s apparently sympathetic response to Humbert’s pedophilia.
⁴⁸

Fearing for his job, Nabokov didn’t tell Morris Bishop about the book’s subject matter until negotiations with Olympia were well underway. Presented with a copy of
Lolita
, Bishop was horrified—he couldn’t even finish the novel. Instead, he found himself imagining the scenarios in which outraged parents fretted over their daughters’ morals, endowments were withdrawn, and his prize professor removed from his position for loose morals.
⁴⁹

Hoping that publication by Olympia would confer a literary sheen on
Lolita
without sullying her name, Nabokov did not yet realize that Girodias had just launched a line of titles including
White Thighs, Rape
, and
The Whip Angels
. His anxiety in the summer before
Lolita
’s arrival in France was nonetheless immense, his letters vibrating with tension. As Girodias planned publicity copy, Nabokov tried to get him to avoid any direct connection to Cornell, and to downplay his status as a university professor. He still hoped to keep his name off the novel, but in the end, he gave in. He underlined that he saw the project as an artistic endeavor. “A
succès de scandale
,” he wrote to Girodias, “would distress me.”
⁵⁰

Nabokov eventually discovered the salacious company
Lolita
was keeping at Olympia Press. Similarly taken by surprise the same year, fellow Olympia author J. P. Donleavy was so horrified at being included in a pornographer’s stable that he vowed revenge
on Girodias, powerless as he was to do anything in the moment.
⁵¹
Nabokov, however, expressed less outrage at the company he had to keep, believing that Olympia was the only way to get
Lolita
into print.

Yet the novel arrived in France that fall to little fanfare—for some time Nabokov was not even sure if it had been published. In addition, a plan to print excerpts from the book in the
Partisan Review
as a way to pave the road for publication in America fell through over anxieties about obscenity charges.
⁵²
It seemed as if the drama for which Nabokov had braced himself would fail to develop.

Edmund Wilson did not incline toward censorship; across the years of his exchanges with Nabokov, he would, in fact, loan or give his friend a copy of more than one Olympia title. But he started to read the manuscript
of Lolita
and found it distasteful: “I like it less than anything else of yours I have read.” After loaning it out to Mary McCarthy and his wife Elena, he was quick to add that latter believed it would be an important book.
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Nabokov, however, would not be put off so easily by Wilson. Even as he criticized his friend’s class-oriented introduction to a new translation of Chekhov, Nabokov wrote that he hoped Wilson would note that
Lolita
“is a highly moral affair.” (In typically Nabokovian fashion, months later he would assert to readers that
Lolita
had “no moral in tow.”)
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Nabokov often revisited and reworked elements of prior stories. He had initially tried an older man/younger girl pairing in his fiction in 1930 when Carl Junghans first dated Véra’s sister Sonia in Berlin. A few years later he had tipped his hand to the idea of a novel about a man who fantasizes about his stepdaughter in
The Gift
. He had later realized the story as a full novella with “The Enchanter.”

Across time, the age gap became larger and the girls’ innocence more pronounced. Despite the interpretations of
Lolita
which suggest she is the agent of Humbert’s corruption, Nabokov rarely missed a public opportunity to condemn Humbert for his treatment
of Lolita, calling him a “vain and cruel wretch”; Véra was even more protective of Lolita, reminding readers about the girl’s nightly tears and expressing admiration for the life she built after escaping from Humbert.
⁵⁵

But if Humbert deserves any pity at all, Nabokov leaves one focal point for sympathy: Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s first love, who died of typhus in Corfu in 1923 when Humbert was just thirteen. Real history lurks here, too, though Nabokov never explained it.

The sunny, delightful haven that readers likely imagined stood in sharp contrast to the reality of Corfu in 1923. The island was at that moment a hellish place where multiple real-world epidemics were underway when the fictional Annabel Leigh died. Thousands of refugees had taken shelter on Corfu in camps, dislocated by war and the Armenian genocide. Relief agencies opened orphanages for those whose parents had been executed or who had died in transit. Typhus and smallpox raged the entire year in what was then called the greatest humanitarian crisis in history. The suffering was exacerbated when, in retaliation for the assassination of an Italian general, Italy directly bombed the Corfu refugees that fall, sparking fears of another world war.

After her death on Corfu, Annabel Leigh haunted Humbert for twenty-four years, until he “broke her spell” by reincarnating her in Lolita. The loss that triggered Humbert’s perversion was rooted in a tragedy the world had forgotten. Like Pnin describing his course on tyranny, recalling the Armenian tragedy and the brutality of European colonial powers in Africa, Humbert was revealing the boundless atrocities of his century—sometimes in ways that reached far beyond Nabokov’s lived experience. But that nod to the dead of Corfu was only the beginning of the lost history Nabokov had folded into
Lolita.
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C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Fame

At the end of 1955, Vladimir Nabokov got the best Christmas present of his life. Novelist (and sometime reviewer) Graham Greene acquired a copy of
Lolita
and named it one of the three best books of the year.

Weeks passed before Nabokov found out about Greene’s choice, though the fuse lit by his review would trigger explosions on both sides of the Atlantic. Greene’s selection, announced in the
Sunday Times
of London, was roundly condemned by
Sunday Express
columnist John Gordon, who denounced the book as “sheer unrestrained pornography.”
¹
In response, Graham Greene suggested starting a John Gordon Society, which could protect Britons by keeping an eye out for dangerous “books, plays, paintings, sculptures, and ceramics.” He went so far as to hold a first meeting of the Society, which garnered even more popular coverage of the controversy, including tentative forays by U.S. critics, many of whom could not yet review
Lolita
but could cover the literary melee.

Not all the doubters were narrow-minded prudes. Even Nabokov’s editor at
The New Yorker
, Katharine White, struggled with
Lolita
. Putting Humbert in the company of Othello and Raskolnikov, Nabokov suggested that perhaps there were not many unforgettable fictional characters “we would like our ‘teenage daughters to meet.”
²

Copies began trickling surreptitiously into the U.S., where the novel was twice seized and twice released by customs officials.
The New York Times
mocked the impulse to control access to
Lolita
, comparing the furor surrounding it to the tempest over Joyce’s
Ulysses
, which had subsided over time.

With all the attention being generated, U.S. publishers began to scheme to bring
Lolita
home. Hoping to establish the novel as literature, Nabokov wrote an overtly literary postscript for the book, while Doubleday invited a scholar to write an introduction. The
Partisan Review
printed
Lolita
’s first American review in the fall of 1957, in which John Hollander dared to call it “just about the funniest book I remember having read.”
³