Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer

Author:Andrea Pitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fame

1

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 ‘teen-age 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

Part of the problem was the need to make a distinction between Lolita and her publisher. While Maurice Girodias enthusiastically published works of artistic merit, he was less concerned with who viewed what as timeless, alternating meek and charming discussions of literature with frank statements about being a deliberate pornographer.4

Publishing houses from all over Europe clamored to print the book in their home countries. Contracts were signed, translations started, but there were complications. One company rushed to highlight all the sexual passages, eliding whole chunks of the novel. More consequentially, Lolita was banned in Britain and France, and also shut out of Argentina and Australia.

Nabokov had predicted the future in a letter to Edmund Wilson, in which he feared that Lolita would end up “published by some shady firm.” In the long run, of course, it was the nature of Nabokov’s protagonist more than his publisher that drew the condemnation. Nonetheless, Nabokov found himself caught up in a French decree banning two dozen books from Olympia Press. Meanwhile, London authorities had already pulled the books from the shelves of the city’s libraries.

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