The fishbowl atmosphere intensified when reporters sniffed out the prospect of a mistress, which provided a motive for Dorothy Grammer’s murder. But when they found her, she turned out to be a United Nations communications officer named Matilda Mizibrocky who swore she didn’t know her beau was married, and they didn’t print her name right away. Even the court hid her under the pseudonym of “Mary Matthews” so that she wouldn’t be hounded further, and her testimony possibly tainted. It didn’t work. Grammer’s defense team was livid that the court tried to shield Mizibrocky from them, too, and hinder their ability to prepare their case.
It isn’t clear if Nabokov followed the news after Grammer’s arrest. The trial showcased further lurid details, and Grammer’s execution by hanging in 1954 became an added spectacle because it was initially botched. But the main affair—husband murders wife, passes it off as car accident—was enough inspiration for him. The Grammer case clearly echoed the untimely death of Charlotte Haze, struck by a car after running away from the argument with Humbert where she learns of his true designs on her daughter.
The final line of the Grammer paragraph in Lolita reads with further chilling force. Grammer could not conceal his crime from the world after all. Humbert Humbert, systematically raping Dolores Haze for nearly two years on a cross-country odyssey, could, and did. No wonder he concluded: “I did better.”
I bring up the Grammer case because it is another concrete example of Vladimir Nabokov drawing upon real-life crimes to help him with his novel. As with Sally Horner’s kidnapping, the note card’s survival indicates that Nabokov attached enough importance to the case that he wished people to know he did at some future point.
But the case also demonstrates Nabokov’s extended interest in crime stories. This, too, he sought to deny in public; he was also openly critical of mystery novels despite his boyhood love of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, and he called out Dostoevsky as a hack, though he taught Crime and Punishment to his Cornell students. He disdained those who would reduce Lolita to genre, yet a great deal of Nabokov’s fiction relies on the tropes of crime and suspense: Invitation to a Beheading centers around a man waiting to be executed; Despair hinges upon a man ready to murder his double; and Lolita, of course, is about kidnapping and rape, and culminates in murder.
Which is also why Nabokov’s interest, just over a month after Lolita’s American publication, in a third crime jumped out at me. As Véra told their close friend Morris Bishop when he telephoned with congratulations on the novel’s success, in the week of September 12, 1958, Vladimir had become obsessed with reading up on the stabbing murders of Dr. Melvin Nimer and his wife, Louise Jean, in their Staten Island home. What fascinated Nabokov was that police initially treated their eight-year-old son, Melvin Jr., as a suspect. Even though strips of cloth found on the boy’s bed suggested he had been restrained while his parents were murdered, Melvin’s “unnaturally calm demeanor” raised red flags in investigators’ minds, as did an apparent confession elicited during a mental health evaluation, and the lack of forced entry into the Nimer home.
But the presumed case against the little boy soon fell apart. No physical evidence linked Melvin to his parents’ murders. And police learned that Dr. Nimer had left a set of spare keys at the hospital where he worked, which had vanished—thus answering the “lack of forced entry” question. The case remains unsolved to this day, but there were police detectives still claiming as recently as 2007 that Melvin Nimer was the best suspect in the case.
THE NABOKOVS WOULD VENTURE WEST one more time before Vladimir finished the Lolita manuscript. After so many years of work—five or six, depending on who was counting and who was listening—Lolita was nearly done, despite not being anywhere close to publication. This road trip also proved to be the longest Vladimir and Véra stayed away from the East Coast.
They left Ithaca in that still-reliable Oldsmobile in early April 1953. From there they headed toward Birmingham, Alabama, a pit stop en route to the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, where butterflies were supposed to be plentiful. What Nabokov discovered upon arrival in May was that the weather was too cold, the wind gusts too strong, for decent butterfly-catching. By the end of the month he and Véra had moved farther west, passing by several California lakes and ending up in Ashland, Oregon.
There the couple stayed from the first of June through the end of August, living at 163 Mead Street. When there were no butterflies to catalog, Nabokov was on a mad sprint to finish Lolita, burning his handwritten pages as soon as Véra typed them up. When their Oregon summer idyll ended, the Nabokovs wended their way back east via Jenny Lake and the Grand Tetons.
Once more, they were back in Ithaca at the start of September, and this time, the end of Lolita was in sight.
Twenty-Six
Writing and Publishing Lolita
On December 6, 1953, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a note in his diary, at the bottom of a page largely filled with numerical grades for the final assignment of his literature class. “Finished Lolita which was begun exactly 5 years ago.” It was a finish line he’d spent many of those years never expecting to reach.
There were classes to teach at Cornell to pay the bills and to fund his summer trips to hunt butterflies. Other projects had also interrupted Nabokov’s progress on Lolita, from translation work (The Song of Igor’s Campaign) to the first version of his autobiography, which was published in 1951. Lolita ought to have been “a novel I would be able to finish in a year if I could completely concentrate upon it.” Instead it emerged piecemeal, with him writing on index cards in the passenger seat of a car or lying in bed at night.
Nabokov had spent the summer of 1953 trip writing steadily, almost maniacally, dictating his prose to Véra, then “crumpling each old manuscript sheet once it had served its turn and discarding the pages out the car window or into a hotel fireplace.” Nabokov put in sixteen-hour writing days over the course of the fall of 1953—on Cornell’s dime—delegating the teaching and exam-marking to Véra.
He grew anxious about the manuscript as the pages piled up. In a September 29, 1953, letter to Katharine White at the New Yorker, Nabokov called the book an “enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel that, after five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors, I have more or less completed.” He was certain the New Yorker wouldn’t want to publish an excerpt, but the magazine had a first-look agreement on anything Nabokov wrote, and he always listened to White’s feedback, whatever the outcome. She liked it, but confirmed Nabokov’s suspicions that the magazine wasn’t the right home for an excerpt.
Now, the book was finished. An odyssey that did not, in fact, begin on December 6, 1948, but at least a decade earlier, as Volshebnik, or in 1947, when Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: “I am writing . . . a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea.” Nabokov knew he was writing a novel that could cause outrage and controversy. No wonder he attempted to destroy the manuscript at least twice that we know of.
The first time was in the fall of 1948. As Stacy Schiff recounted in her biography of Véra, Nabokov carried his manuscript to the trash cans behind his house on Seneca Street in Ithaca. When Véra realized what Vladimir was set upon doing, she raced out to stop him. Just before she got there, one of Nabokov’s students at Cornell, Dick Keegan, chanced upon the scene. He saw Nabokov beginning to feed his manuscript sheets into a fire set near the trash cans. “Appalled, [Véra] fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. ‘Get away from there!’ Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. ‘We are keeping this,’ she announced.”
On at least one other occasion, when Nabokov wished to destroy the Lolita manuscript, Véra also stepped in as savior. It may well be that Nabokov’s attempts to get rid of Lolita were more about performance than intent. As Robert Roper pointed out, “Véra came to the rescue because she was nearby; he did not start fi
res when his wife was out of the house.” These acts made Véra a veritable Saint Joan* figure with respect to Lolita, sacrificing herself—if risking her husband’s ire was a sacrifice—to step in and save what would be one of the most important works of literature in the twentieth century.
Nabokov later told the Paris Review of yet another instance of near-destruction, “one day in 1950.” Once more, Véra “was responsible for stopping me and urging delay and second thoughts as, beset with technical difficulties and doubts, I was carrying the first chapters of Lolita to the garden incinerator.” He may have mixed up the dates and this was the incident that Dick Keegan witnessed. Or there might have been an unrecorded instance where Véra saved the day.
Lolita was ready to be submitted to publishers, but there was a catch: Nabokov refused to put his own name to the novel. He asked Katharine White, in the same letter in which he solicited her feedback, whether book publishers would go along with his request. She replied that “from her experience, an author’s identity sooner or later leaked out.” Still, Nabokov wanted to keep his identity secret, for the same reasons that spurred him to burn the manuscript pages of Lolita as he finished them. He believed being publicly associated with such an incendiary book might imperil both his literary and his teaching careers.
As the manuscript for Lolita made its way around New York publishing houses, Nabokov continued to insist that he publish under a pseudonym. His stubborn desire for anonymity may be one of the reasons why that first round of publishers decided against acquiring Lolita.
Nabokov’s editor at Viking, Pascal Covici, rejected the manuscript. So, too, did James Laughlin, the New Directions publisher whom Nabokov worked with on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Laughter in the Dark, and Nikolai Gogol. Farrar, Straus and Simon & Schuster also came back with the same verdict: they didn’t believe they could publish because it would be too expensive to defend in court on possible obscenity charges. Jason Epstein at Doubleday did want to publish, but the company president, once he got wind of what Lolita was about, overruled him.
The manuscript also detoured away from publishing offices, making its way into the literary world. The critic Edmund Wilson read half and expressed complicated feelings about the book in a letter to Nabokov (“I like it less than anything else of yours I have read”), perhaps because it reminded him too much of his own censorship battles after the publication of his novel Memoirs of Hecate County, which was banned and then pulped. Wilson’s former wife, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy, grew “negative and perplexed” by Lolita, but Wilson’s present wife, Elena, liked the book. Dorothy Parker almost certainly read it, too, if a parody piece in the New Yorker featuring a character named “Lolita” is enough to go by.
Influential literary readers were all well and good, but their verdicts did not matter if the book never found a publisher. The last of the rejections by American book firms arrived in February 1955. To publish Lolita, Nabokov had to look outside of America, and beyond highbrow intellectual circles. Nabokov joked to Edmund Wilson several weeks later: “I suppose it will be finally published by some shady firm with a Viennese-Dream name.” The joke became truth before the summer of 1955 was over.
MAURICE GIRODIAS was the founder and publisher of Olympia Press, best known for publishing books others wouldn’t touch. Most of those books were, in fact, smut—badly written, hastily produced. Others got that label affixed to them, like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and the pseudonymous The Story of O (revealed, decades later, to be the work of Anne Desclos).
Nabokov’s Europe-based agent, Doussia Ergaz, submitted Lolita to Girodias because of his work as an art-book publisher. She didn’t seem to know much about the seedier side of Olympia Press. Girodias was fully aware of the literary value of Nabokov’s work, and what a boon it would be for Olympia’s list. Girodias offered on the book in mid-May 1955. Ergaz then wrote Nabokov: “He finds the book not only admirable from the literary point of view, but he thinks that it might lead to a change in social attitudes toward the kind of love described in Lolita, provided of course that it has this authenticity, this burning and irrepressible ardor.”
Nabokov went along with Girodias’s misapprehension about there being a social aim to the novel because he was relieved Lolita had at last found a publisher. That relief dissipated quickly, once he realized the contract he’d signed on June 6, 1955, better resembled a devil’s bargain. Nabokov’s new publisher had mistaken the author for his creation, thinking Nabokov drew upon some perverse experience. Girodias also insisted the novel be published under Nabokov’s name, and Nabokov did not feel he had the leverage to object, when the alternate option was no publication at all. Nabokov also did not see galley proofs until it was too late to make changes, which vexed a man known for his fastidiousness to no end. Olympia Press published Lolita on September 16, 1955, but Nabokov did not discover that it was out for several weeks. And the published version, as Nabokov feared, was riddled with errors.
What most infuriated Nabokov, however, was Girodias’s blithe attitude about copyright and about paying him what he was owed. The publisher had registered Lolita’s copyright in Nabokov’s name as well as to Olympia Press. Nabokov did not discover the joint copyright registration until early 1956, and because of American copyright laws at the time, he had just five years to republish Lolita in America or else the novel would fall into the public domain.
The Copyright Office in Washington advised Nabokov to get a “quit-claim”—a formal renunciation of copyright. The publisher did not reply at first, then dragged his feet throughout 1956 and 1957. As Nabokov later recalled, “From the very start I was confronted with the peculiar aura surrounding [Girodias’s] business transactions with me, an aura of negligence, evasiveness, procrastination, and falsity.”
Girodias also had a pesky habit of failing to pay royalties or to send statements. Thus, Nabokov saw no money from Lolita over the first two years of publication, despite strong sales in France. In October 1957, he had finally had enough of Girodias’s prevarications and shady dealings, telling him the deal was off and that as a result, all rights reverted back to him. Girodias paid what was owed (44,220 “anciens francs”), and Nabokov let the matter go. Girodias, however, soon reverted back to his nonpayment ways, and Nabokov’s irritation increased. He needed the money, but above all, he needed to be free of Olympia in order to publish Lolita the way he had always wished.
Fortunately for Nabokov, his mood was about to lighten. Lolita was about to find, at long last, a home in America.
ON AUGUST 30, 1957, Nabokov received a letter from Walter Minton, president and publisher of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. “Being a rather backward example of that rather backward species, the American publisher, it was only recently that I began to hear about a book called Lolita,” Minton wrote. After some more preamble, he got to the point: “I am wondering if the book is available for publication.”
Minton, in his early thirties, had succeeded his father, Melville, as publisher two years earlier, and within months established his taste for novels too controversial for other publishers. Putnam published Norman Mailer’s second novel, The Deer Park, which had been turned down by his option publisher, and several others, for a graphic description of oral sex that each publisher feared would run afoul of obscenity laws. This passage did not deter Minton, who authorized Putnam to run newspaper ads declaring The Deer Park was “The Book Six Publishers Refused to Bring You!”
Minton enjoyed being part of the cultural conversation, especially when there was a chance that the conversation would offend people. In hindsight, it made sense he ended up publishing Lolita. The delicious thing is that he learned of the novel from an unlikely source: his then-mistress Rosemary Ridgewell, a showgirl at a Midtown Manhattan nightclub called the Latin Quarter. Ridgewell had read excerpts of Lolita in the Anchor Review. “I thought Nabokov had a very interesting way of writing, very, you know—crystalline?” said
Ridgewell in 1958.
Minton, in turn, discovered the pages at her Upper East Side apartment. “I woke in the middle of the night and there was this story on the table. I started reading,” he recalled in early 2018, sixty years later. “By morning, I knew I had to publish it.” (Ridgewell was in line for a tidy payday for her literary scouting efforts, per a standing Putnam policy: the equivalent of 10 percent of an author’s royalties for the first year, plus 10 percent of the publisher’s share of subsidiary rights for two years.)
When Nabokov received Minton’s letter, he had all but given up on Lolita’s publishing prospects in America. For more than three years, multiple publishers had expressed interest, only to back off. Now it irked him that Girodias might be in line for a significant payout when he had been so slow with the initial Lolita royalties, and then did not bother to pay further monies Nabokov was owed. In the two years since Lolita first appeared in book form, he was desperate to reap the financial rewards—as well as to get the critical attention he deserved.
Lolita had been banned in France, excerpted in the Anchor Review, praised by the novelist Graham Greene, excoriated by the literary editor and critic John Gordon, and bought in droves by those willing to smuggle copies back into America. All manner of people benefited from Lolita, whether to praise or denounce it, but Vladimir Nabokov had hardly earned a dime for his years of creative labor.
Minton’s letter augured a change in fortune. Nabokov wrote back on September 7 to say Minton was free to negotiate with Olympia Press, though “I would have to give my approval to the final arrangements.” Nabokov added a warning: “Mr. Girodias, the owner of Olympia, is a rather difficult person. I shall be delighted if you come to terms with him.” 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.”
The Real Lolita Page 16
