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January 25 - February 9, 2021
Minton did not seem fazed by Girodias’s unsavory reputation. Nor was the Putnam publisher perturbed by the prospect of defending Lolita all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary, though he cautioned Nabokov that he could not make such a “blanket guarantee”—rather, he wrote that it was more prudent to “present the book in such a way as to minimize its chance of prosecution.” Minton also wondered whether Lolita could, in fact, fall into the public domain.
Nabokov told Minton that he knew “at least three or four thousand copies” of the Olympia Press edition of Lolita had been sold in the United States. Minton explained, “I said to him, ‘Don’t ever open your mouth about that to anybody because if it ever became established your copyright wouldn’t be worth beans.”
As Minton explained to him over the winter of 1958, publishing Lolita when interest was high would make it more likely that the courts would rule in Nabokov’s favor: the many articles, vociferous discussion, and chatter would demonstrate this was a book of high literary merit, not low smut. Should Nabokov delay in publishing Lolita in America to resolve his dispute with Girodias, the favorable publicity could evaporate—and so would the potential for a great financial windfall, whatever a court of law might decide. Nabokov saw Minton’s logic.
Minton cabled Girodias on February 11 and received Nabokov’s signed contract on March 1. By the time of the novel’s American publication date on August 18, 1958, it was clear to all, but most especially to Nabokov, that he was about to be vaulted from literary obscurity, and that Lolita was about to arrive with hurricane-level force. VLADIMIR AND VÉRA NABOKOV left Ithaca on another road trip in the summer of 1958. Whether to fend off nerves or steel themselves for what was to come, the couple traveled more than eight thousand miles in search of butterflies.
Elizabeth Janeway’s rave review, which ran on Sunday, August 17, in the New York Times Book Review. She described the novel as “one of the funniest and one of the saddest books of the year” and declared that it was anything but pornographic: “I can think of few volumes more likely to quench the flames of lust than this exact and immediate description of its consequences.” Janeway’s positive reaction, plus the increased demand, would compensate for Orville Prescott’s pan in the daily paper on publication day proper, August 18. The reorder number from retailers zoomed up to 6,777 in the first
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Six months after ensuring Lolita would be published in America without legal hassle or copyright consequence, Nabokov and Minton’s mutual investment was paying clear and major dividends.
There were more riches in store for the Nabokovs. On Minton’s recommendation, they retained Irving “Swifty” Lazar to sell film rights to Lolita to Stanley Kubrick for $150,000.
Véra was the one who kept track of it all, recording every bit of Lolita-related news in the months immediately preceding and following the novel’s publication in the Page-a-Day diary. Nabokov, on the other hand, seemed “supremely indifferent—occupied with a ne...
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As the deluge of letters, interview requests, and subsidiary rights inquiries streamed in, Nabokov wrote his sister: “[All this] ought to have happened thirty years ago. . . . I don’t think I s...
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Lolita’s success enabled his permanent break with the United States, though he would continue to insist, years after moving to the Montreux Palace hotel in Switzerland, that he might return. But Switzerland’s advantageous tax laws were too much of a boon—as was a greater sense of control and privacy, as “Hurricane Lolita” grew stronger and louder. Now that Nabokov could afford to write full-time, thanks to his most American book, he could embark upon his next phase: as a literary celebrity in voluntary exile, as opposed to the peripatetic refugee. He would see the country that gave him
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Welding theorized, with the careful, awkwardly worded hedge, that “it is not unlikely to suppose” that Nabokov did not begin to work on Lolita “until 1950, under the stimulus of the stories of the LaSalle-Horner case. All evidence, in fact, would seem to support this position.” This is false, since Nabokov’s own December 1953 diary entry, celebrating the completion of the manuscript after five years of work, refutes Welding. We also know this supposition is false thanks to the existence of The Enchanter.
Welding was off base but his suppositions make sense: whenever Nabokov first learned of what happened to Sally Horner, that knowledge helped him to transform a partial manuscript primed for failure into the eventual, unlikely, staggering success of Lolita. If such knowledge was publicized, it would not look good for Nabokov—rightly or wrongly—to be seen as pilfering from a real girl’s plight for his fictional masterpiece.
It’s not clear whether Levin, thirty-seven at the time, found an advance copy of the November issue of Nugget on his own or if someone tipped him off. However he got ahold of Welding’s story, Levin knew there was one of his own to write—could it be true that Lolita owed its plot to a sensational kidnapping? And if it was true, what would the great Vladimir Nabokov have to say on the matter? Levin posted a letter to Nabokov on September 9, 1963, which arrived in Montreux, Switzerland, just four days later. The official Nabokov response, written and signed by Véra, reached Levin soon thereafter.
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Levin quoted just enough of Véra’s letter to make the Nabokov case plain, and enough of Welding’s Nugget piece to answer the question. But it’s helpful to read Véra’s letter to Levin in full, as it offers a fascinating window into her (and Nabokov’s) thought process.
Dear Mr. Levin, My husband asks me to thank you for your letter of September 9. He has not seen the article in Nugget, which makes it difficult for him to answer your letter. At the time he was writing LOLITA he studied a considerable number of case histories (“real” stories) many of which have more affinities with the LOLITA plot than the one mentioned by Mr. Welding. The latter is mentioned also in the book LOLITA. It did not inspire the book. My husband wonders what importance could possibly be attached to the existence in “real” life of “actual rape abductions” when explaining the
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Véra’s letter showcases the many roles she played as “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov”: defender of her husband, curator of a singular line of vision about Nabokov’s work that put his creative genius above everything else, and master obfuscator when presented with anything that dented the Nabokov myth.
Any speculation that Lolita could be inspired by a real-life case went against the single-minded Nabokovian belief that art supersedes influence, and so influence must be brushed off.
I don’t believe this.
But this is interesting.
The Nabokovs even kept a copy of the August 1960 issue of Cosmopolitan, featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor, at the ripe old age of forty-three, dressed up as twelve-year-old Lolita in a straining baby-doll nightgown, an apple in her hands, licking her lips in equal parts faux-innocence and come-hither enticement. And other fashion and girlie mags from France and Italy, each with photo shoots of starlets garbed in Lolita-like frocks as a pictorial audition for a film part they desperately wanted to play.
Haha. This is super important.
This novel was meant for adults and adult projections about childhood.
This is also fucked up.
Nabokov must have had a reason to hold on to those two index cards and not burn them, as he had burned handwritten pages of the manuscript. He had been compelled to write notes on both cases, and in particular the death of Sally Horner. He included the parenthetical reference in the novel when he could have left out any mention altogether. Sally’s story mattered to Nabokov because Lolita would not have been finished if he hadn’t read of Sally’s kidnapping.
Stacy Schiff, Véra’s biographer, strongly advised against reading anything specific into Véra’s blanket denial to Levin. Schiff told me that Véra’s letter “reads like everything else [the Nabokovs said] about the primacy of art. It’s a realm unto itself, and everything else is on some pedestrian or insignificant level.” Véra, Schiff said, dismissed anything that could be perceived as a “mandarin influence on high art.” The everyday needed to be discarded at the altar of creative imagination.
No. Not ever. 😷💀☠️
If art was to prevail—and for the Nabokovs, it always did—then explicitly revealing what lay behind the curtain of fiction in the form of a real-life case could shatter the illusion of total creative control. Véra’s denial by letter had to be definitive to make pesky tabloid reporters slink away without investigating the matter more deeply.
Vladimir Nabokov’s otherwise scrupulous archive of Lolita-related clippings failed to include anything about Sally Horner because if it had, then the dots would connect with more force, which would upset the carefully constructed myth of Nabokov, the sui generis artist, whose imagination and gifts were far superior to others’. It’s as if he didn’t trust Lolita to stand on its own against the real story of Sally Horner. As a result, Sally’s plight was sanded over, all but forgotten.
I’m so sorry this happened.
Decades after Ruth Janisch gently coaxed Sally Horner to make the long-distance telephone call that freed her from Frank La Salle, Ruth was having tea with her daughter Rachel. After years of estrangement, Rachel had decided she wanted a closer relationship to her mother. In Sally’s story, Ruth was a heroine whose actions changed the course of a girl’s life forever. But to her children, Ruth was a more complicated, infuriating, mercurial, manipulative creature, whose actions led to long estrangements.
Ruth would meet someone and say something along the lines of “Hello, my name is Ruth. What can you do for me?” Years into adulthood, some of Ruth’s children would make peace with the woman she was.
She had looked the other way when her children were abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually, by the men in her life, be they husbands or short-lived romantic partners. Ruth had, at times, enabled that abuse by not believing her children and choosing, instead, to believe the men.
Rachel would not grasp the impact of her mother’s verbal abuse for years. Then, she thought Ruth’s behavior was normal.
Once Rachel’s divorce was final, in the late 1970s, she found a job near where her mother lived. She also thought about what kind of relationship she wanted with Ruth. Because Rachel, despite the past, liked her mother. They shared a love of gardening and of books. As adult women, they could converse, if not as equals then at least on a similar plane. Rachel decided she could handle visiting Ruth at least once a week for tea. The visits were calm at first. She felt herself understanding her mother better. She felt she had enough emotional distance to appreciate Ruth, the woman, and leave the
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Vanessa, sixteen at the time, was puzzled at first at her mother’s insistence she read the novel. Then Ruth explained: “Lolita tells the story of a girl named Sally Horner. A girl who died just before you were born. A girl I helped rescue from a man named Frank La Salle.” This was no mere novel, but literary validation of Ruth’s sense of self, that her single act of decency had larger heroic meaning.
Rachel would have stayed silent regardless. The girl’s earlier hospital experience taught her not to trust adults. They could abandon you for months. They could leave you alone and never tell you when you might come home. And when you did come home, you didn’t know what awaited. Whether it was a safe haven or a recurring nightmare.
😔🙁
Rachel would recall that when she told her mother what La Salle had done, a barrier went up right away between herself and Ruth. Like an electrified fence where venturing too close might lead to a surprise shock. She felt her mother shut down. Rachel decided to change the subject to safer territory. She had taken a risk and it did not work. When that happened, as it had so many times in her past, the best thing to do was to be like a turtle. Retreat within the shell and never reveal your vulnerable self again.
She suspected Ruth never allowed herself to contemplate her complicity in the damage done to her own children. No wonder Ruth acted as if the conversation never happened. The subject never came up between them again. Neither did Lolita.
Diana was only four years old when Sally died. Her parents were chiefly concerned with making sure their daughter had a happy childhood, and hiding their hurt, however deep the wounds ran. Just as Susan didn’t speak much about her younger sister, neither did Al speak of his experiences in World War II. It seemed easier to keep the past behind a locked door and to keep silent on family tragedy. “I still can’t believe something like this happened in my family,” Diana told me. “I never got to know my aunt Sally. I also wish I could have been able to support my mom during that awful period.”
I’d explained why I was calling her out of the blue. Her incredulity was palpable. So, too, was her admiration for her long-deceased best friend. “I was so unbelievably impressed by her. Sally taught me a great deal. After she was gone, I went through modeling classes to be a ‘lady.’ Because that’s the way Sally was. I wanted to be like her. So I was. I went through those classes, how to walk and sit and stand and so forth. I paid attention to actions, movements, how to dress, and thoroughly enjoyed it because I could be just like Sally. I was on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t have
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Véra Nabokov continued what had become a custom for her since May 20, 1958: jotting down her private thoughts in the diary that had previously been the sole property of her husband. Véra’s notes largely indicate delight at Lolita’s success, but one subject bothered her above all: the way that public reception, and critical assessments, seemed to forget that there was a little girl at the center of the novel, and that she deserved more attention and care: I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence upon the monstrous HH, and her
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Lolita’s success almost seemed designed so people missed the point.
Its original publication by Olympia Press established its bona fides as a book too controversial for American consumption. And then, once it was finally published in the United States, the conversation centered around Humbert Humbert’s desires and his “love story” with Dolores Haze, with few acknowledging, or even comprehending, that their relationship was an abuse of power.
This is important.
It allowed for a culture of teen-temptress vamping that did not account for the victimization at the novel’s core. Sixty years on, many readers still don’t see through Humbert Humbert’s vile perversions, and still blame Dolores Haze for her behavior, as if she had the will to resist, and chose not to.
Polly let slip to Véra that she first learned of her husband’s involvement with Ridgewell through the “horrid” Time article. Véra was, apparently, unnerved by Polly’s confession, but had the wherewithal to observe in her diary: “Poor Polly, small-town little girl, craving for so many pounds of ‘culture’ gift-boxed and tied with a nice pink bow!” Véra did not know Rosemary, but based on what Polly told her and the Time article, she judged her as “a pretty awful, vulgar but flashy young female.” Odd as this encounter was for Véra, the evening devolved further. After Victor Schaller and his wife
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It details a culture of misogyny and impunity in the publishing industry. ‘Lolita’ had a respectable, cultured publisher who was a terrible, toxic, privileged dolt. He made a lot of money with this book.
It’s very wrong and very sickening.
The next day, Véra wrote, “Minton told V., ‘I hear Dmitri gave Polly a good time last night.’” Véra did not know what to make of Minton’s comment. “I wonder if this sort of thing is normal or typical of today’s America? A bad novel by some O’Hara or Cozens [sic] suddenly come to life.”
Damn. Thanks, I hate it.
What Véra Nabokov witnessed, and grew so disturbed by that she was compelled to write about it in her diary, seemed like a harbinger of all the ways in which American culture would corrupt Lolita and misunderstand Nabokov’s meaning.
Lolita’s appeal extended to fashion magazines and film, with dissonant, even bizarre results. These depictions were largely knowing, winking parodies, playing up the overt sexuality of certain blond bombshell personas in the guise of younger girls. The most blatant reference to Nabokov’s creation, equal parts amusing and disturbing, appeared in the film Let’s Make Love, which features Marilyn Monroe singing a version of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” after announcing: “My name . . . is Lolita. And I’m . . . not supposed to . . . play . . . with boys!”
Newspaper coverage of the contest reached Dmitri’s father, who was upset enough to send a telegram to his son asking for the contest to be stopped. “The publicity is in very bad taste,” Nabokov wrote Dmitri on October 7, 1960. “It can only harm you in the eyes of those who take music seriously. It has already harmed me: because of it I cannot come to Italy since the reporters would immediately pounce on me there.” Nabokov was especially disappointed in Dmitri for letting “this unhealthy ruckus” overshadow his own career. Dmitri learned his lesson. From that point on, he would defend Lolita’s
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“…but the contest mess was further proof of the ways in which perceptions of Lolita moved from tragedy to carnival.”
Contract from Kubrick and his producing partner, James Harris, in hand, the Nabokovs ventured west to Los Angeles, arriving in March. Vladimir holed up for the next few months to complete the screenplay. The first draft, finished in August 1960, ran more than four hundred pages long. That draft was not used, and neither were subsequent ones Nabokov wrote before he and Véra sailed back to Europe in November. Kubrick rewrote the screenplay substantially before shooting the film the following year, though Nabokov was still given sole screenplay credit when the film was released in 1962 and he was
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This will be cut off as well.
Kubrick wrote the screenplay in a late draft. Nabokov gets full credit in the finished film.
Tuesday Weld, already an established television and film star at seventeen, was a serious contender, much to Nabokov’s chagrin (“a graceful ingenue but not my idea of Lolita”), but she declined the role, famously saying, “I didn’t have to play Lolita. I was Lolita.”
This is really deeply unsettling.
The history of these adaptations, nearly all by middle-aged men, indicate how far out of touch they were from the novel’s core depiction of sexual abuse.
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“The history of these adaptations, nearly all by middle-aged men, indicate how far out of touch they were from the novel’s core depiction of sexual abuse.”
Entertainment is very much more Lolita than ‘Lolita’. There is something very much wrong with this in America. (And elsewhere)
Nabokov not only drew from Havelock Ellis’s history of sexual deviants, but also reacted to the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud—whose psychoanalytic theories he detested. “I think he’s crude. I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me,” Nabokov huffed in a 1965 interview.
The dark heart of Lolita, and the tragedy of Dolores Haze, may now be too much to transform into entertainment. It’s wiser, and saner, to remember the little girl at the center of the novel, and all of the real girls, like Sally Horner, who suffered and survived.
Diana was startled by the photograph—she had never seen it before. Seeing her and her family all together, so long ago, made Sally’s story feel fresher, more vivid. The tragic parts, but also the happier parts. Sally had come home and was part of their family again, even if it wasn’t for very long.
By our second face-to-face meeting, nearly a year later, Diana had had more time to sit with the idea that Sally’s story was part of a larger mosaic of girls and women who had been cruelly wronged and abused by men. Stigmas take a long time to fade. But the more Diana talked about her aunt, the more the relief, and even the joy, showed through to compensate for what she, her family, and Sally had lost.
He denied Lolita was based upon a real girl, despite the parenthetical mention of Sally Horner. He denied any moral agenda, telling the Paris Review: “it is not my sense of the immorality of the . . . relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”
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“He denied Lolita was based upon a real girl, despite the parenthetical mention of Sally Horner. He denied any moral agenda, telling the Paris Review: “it is not my sense of the immorality of the . . . relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.””
This is as bad as any pro-white supremacy quote that Lincoln made.
