Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  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. Lolita had somehow grown larger than her author, and all Nabokov could do was agonize over the fate of the greatest book he had written, one which would surely determine his legacy as an artist.5

  2

  The question of exactly what Nabokov was trying to do with Humbert intrigued readers from the beginning. Was the book supposed to represent Old Europe debauching young America? Young America corrupting Old Europe? But inasmuch as they considered the question, critics peered at Humbert through the lens of metaphor, rather than attending to events in the world in which he lived.

  Addressing Humbert’s sins, Nabokov would later compare him to Hermann from Despair, drawing some distinctions between the two men. But more unites them than divides them. Both men write stories explaining themselves and the events that led them to kill. Both are cuckolded by their partners—though Lolita’s age and tears reveal her as hardly a willing one, despite Humbert’s obfuscations. Both have an intimate, extended murder scene with a man they believe to be a shadow double of themselves, a person who has become an obsession. Both men’s lives are upended by world wars in which they did not fight. Humbert, like Hermann, is occasionally delusional; he himself describes his battles with insanity and institutionalization during the war, before he met Lolita.

  Where their paths seem to diverge, Humbert’s background grows murky. Hermann was interned for years as an enemy alien in Russia in World War I, while Humbert fled France during World War II. Yet strange echoes from the war rattle the coherence of Humbert’s story.

  Lining up Humbert’s account of his war years with real-world history suggests that behind the delusional Humbert’s account, Nabokov pondered duplicating Hermann’s war experience. Arriving in the U.S., Humbert manages at first to make his way without disaster. In the novel, his first institutionalization occurs early in 1942. At that time the U.S. had just entered the war, and the real-world analogs of foreign anarchists like Humbert were being rounded up for detention, facing a very different kind of “institutionalization” in the United States.6 Humbert’s first institutionalization in the novel occurs, in fact, just a month or two after Carl Junghans’s internment ended in the real world.

  After being institutionalized in the U.S. in the early 1940s, Humbert mentions that he also went on a trip to northern Canada. Humbert’s talk of a “hush-hush” trip to Arctic regions involving weather stations and meteorologists mirrors some of the half-real, half-invented Arctic “intelligence” Junghans had passed on to the FBI and had written about in propaganda articles during the war.7

  Humbert is by no means Junghans, but Junghans makes sense as a partial prototype for Humbert. He was also charming, cosmopolitan, and liked hinting at his (sometimes dubious) links to espionage. Given that Junghans’s Berlin romance with Sonia Slonim preceded Camera Obscura, Nabokov may have been accustomed to making use of the rich material provided by Junghans’s life.

  But even ignoring any link to Junghans’s tall tales, the details Humbert gives for his trip to northern Canada seem preposterous. He talks of doing “twenty months of cold labor” and “being made to partake in a good deal of menial work” with other unfortunate and troubled people. Accompanying a top-secret expedition to Canada, as Humbert claims was the case, is a strange wartime opportunity for a mad foreigner just released from a mental hospital. But being in Canada in 1943 doing menial labor for twenty months with other displaced people was a typical wartime fate for foreigners who were anarchists.8

  By 1943, more than twenty-two concentration camps dotted the Canadian landscape. The camps housed anarchists, Communists, Nazi POWs, German sympathizers, and thousands of completely innocent refugees. And by chance or intention, among the most northern of them was Camp Q, the nickname that Humbert invented for Lolita’s summer camp.

  Camp Q was located in the wilds of Ontario. Open from 1940 to 1946, the camp saw more than 6,700 prisoners delivered to its gates.9 Jewish civilian refugees, most from Austria and Germany, were forced to bunk in the same quarters with Nazi officers. Some of the refugees had even made their way out of German concentration camps only to find themselves locked up with and threatened by the very people they thought they had escaped.

  Dozens of stories about civilians and Nazis alike held in northern Ontario ran in The New York Times during the war, along with accounts of civilians interned at other Canadian sites—including one prisoner who had been deputized by President Roosevelt to help rescue Jews from Europe, but who found himself instead arrested by the British.10

  A story about one of Camp Q’s more famous inmates, Ernst Hanfstaengl, ran in The New Yorker during the war. “The Talk of the Town” piece mocked the former confidant of Hitler, who, like Junghans, claimed to have had fled Germany in fear for his life after a dispute with Joseph Goebbels. The New Yorker noted archly that he appeared to have a lot of free time for reading at his concentration camp, and that his letters from internment requested “a new
pair of heavy black Oxfords, size 12D.”11

  Nabokov may well have intended Humbert’s months in Canada to replicate Hermann’s internment in Despair. Nabokov had surely known about Canadian camps housing political radicals since 1917, when the Russian Provisional Government agonized over whether or not to call for Trotsky’s release from one of them, with such devastating consequences for Russia.

  He had also likely heard of the spirited debate in Britain over the arrests of refugees that had begun to take place during his last days in Europe, stories that continued to run in newspapers after his arrival in America. Had Nabokov sailed for Canada or London instead of New York in May 1940, his family would have remained at liberty, but some of the Jewish passengers with whom he had escaped would have been sent to Allied concentration camps on arrival.

  3

  Given the publicity surrounding Lolita after Graham Greene’s review, many American publishing houses expressed interest in providing a home for the novel, but Nabokov’s legal obligations to Olympia were a perpetual stumbling block. More than one publisher gave up after Girodias demanded staggering percentages in exchange for American rights to the book. In an attempt to regain control, Nabokov declared his contract with Girodias void two separate times, citing a clause he believed had been broken.12

  But in the end G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which had not been involved in any of the previous discussions or disputes, stepped in after its publisher got a tip from a Copacabana showgirl he had met at a party. The showgirl later ended up in a bottle fight with the publisher at a nightclub in Paris as Girodias looked on, but, miraculously, at some point the paperwork was signed. Girodias would have his money; Minton would get Lolita; and Nabokov would gain immortality.13

  Meanwhile, the Nabokovs were living the last more or less normal year of their lives in America. After two years studying singing at a Boston conservatory, Dmitri had been drafted. He went off to basic training, but returned to Ithaca regularly. Edmund Wilson had also come to visit them at Cornell, taking meals and whiskey with his leg propped up due to gout. Sonia Slonim wrote to Véra about a visit she had made to see Elena in Switzerland. Nabokov in turn wrote to Elena to mourn the recent death of Evgenia Hofeld, and asked how they might best help the family in Prague now that she was gone.14

  In August 1958 Lolita finally made her way from France to America, reversing Humbert Humbert’s journey in the novel. Though the original French ban had been lifted in January 1958, a new one was instated in July, boding ill for publication in the more conservative United States.15

  Vladimir and Véra had by then lived through a nerve-racking, initially inadvertent publicity campaign that rolled on with accelerating momentum—without any guarantee of whether the book would be banned, seized, and destroyed. If the rising tide of notoriety made the novel a target, the Nabokovs could only hope that fame would render it bulletproof.

  The United States seemed to have grown tired of McCarthy and the suspicious approach to art that had torpedoed Hecate County a decade before. Such stories still tweaked public morality, but perhaps Americans would now be willing to accept the possibility that something more substantial than pornography was lurking in their pages. That summer, the Nabokovs drove their ‘57 Buick west along the northern U.S. border to Montana, cruising for a few days into Canada and returning via the Black Hills. They made their way back to Ithaca before Lolita’s August publication stateside. Understanding that everything was about to change, Vladimir and Véra both began keeping a diary, the better to remember it all.16

  The Monday that Lolita hit stores, reorders soared, finishing up in the thousands before the end of the day. By Friday morning the book was in its third printing.

  The furor was now on both sides of the Atlantic. A tourist returning from America found her copy seized by British customs. Officials informed the press that if “the lady does not agree with our decision she is at liberty to appeal.” Caught up in a larger discussion over homosexuality and drinking on Sunday, Lolita would be debated in the House of Commons, where Nabokov’s novel would find opposition from a group that had once rebuked the Prime Minister for a Sunday game of cricket.17

  There were American detractors as well. In his “Books of the Times” column, New York Times’ critic Orville Prescott called it “dull, dull, dull” and “repulsive.” Alice Dixon Bond of the Boston Herald similarly disapproved, writing, “You can emphasize the fact that it is finely written … but when you get all through, you have nothing more than plain pornography.”18

  The book met with resistance abroad, and the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library followed suit. The Cincinnati Public Library system similarly refused to allow the book on its shelves, while the subsequent resignation in protest of the ban by library selection committee member Mrs. Campbell Crockett roiled the staff.19

  For all the outrage, however, seldom had a book been so lauded with blurbs on opening day, praised by a cavalcade of literary giants from Dorothy Parker and Lionel Trilling to William Styron. Whether they were leading or trailing critical opinion, the sales were staggering. Nabokov’s newfound Hollywood agent declared that Lolita was the fastest-selling novel since Gone with the Wind.

  But amid the fireworks, a short review from Sylvia Berkman for The New York Times Book Review made less noise. Looking at Nabokov’s Dozen, a collection of short stories also published in 1958, Berkman had a different view of the man with whom she had carpooled to Wellesley a decade earlier—seeing something others had missed. She noted Nabokov’s preoccupation with the minute individual “rammed” by impersonal political forces and the “private loss, dislocation, and damaged hope” that trail in the wake of such collisions. What was extraordinary about Nabokov, Berkman wrote, was that he somehow managed to retrieve and record “the simple, single note of agony” from a human being crushed by history.20

  4

  In Lolita, Humbert recounts fleeing wartime Europe to design perfume ads for his uncle in New York. Yet even after the war has ended, it haunts his dreams. His sleeping mind drifts to tragic episodes of vivisection. He imagines twenty soldiers lined up in a raping queue. In his nightmares, he sees “the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.”21

  Lolita is filled with unforgettable images, but the dead women’s wigs may be its most resonant moment. In a book ostensibly about something else entirely, Nabokov blindsides the reader, once again rendering the Holocaust and its death camps vivid. A mid-century refugee, Humbert in the hands of Nabokov cannot exist in isolation from the war.

  Those brown wigs surely belong to Orthodox Jewish women, who shave and then cover their heads, but their Jewishness is never mentioned explicitly in the novel. In fact, neither the word “Jew” nor the word “Jewish” appears anywhere in the book, the only novel Nabokov wrote in a thirty-two-year stretch for which that statement is true. This would not be particularly remarkable, except that Humbert and other characters manage to find a spectacular number of ways not to use these terms. Eva Rosen, a friend of Lolita’s, is described as a “displaced little person from France.” Despite the Anglophilic aspirations of her school, she has a Brooklyn accent. Nabokov leaves unsaid that that accent was so recognizably stigmatized as Jewish in mid-century America that Brooklyn Jews who could afford to do so attended elocution lessons (often in vain) in an attempt to hide it. A stranger who wakes in Humbert’s hotel room having forgotten who he is likewise speaks in “pure Brooklynese.”22

  Humbert is exquisitely sensitive to the plight of refugees from the war, as well as the blithe American anti-Semitism swirling in its wake. When Lolita’s mother wishes for a “trained servant maid, like the German girl the Talbots spoke of,” it is, of course, the real-world Jewish refugees who so often could only get into the country by becoming domestics, regardless of their skills or education. When Alexandra Tolstoy was desperately trying to obtain visas for the Nabokovs, service as a maid had been the career for which she thought it possible to secure affidavits for the multilingual Véra.23


  More tellingly, on Humbert’s first visit to The Enchanted Hunters, the hotel where he first rapes Lolita, he notices the hotel manager examining his features and “wrestl(ing) with some dark doubts,” then denying him a room. Only with great difficulty does Humbert change the manager’s mind. He later tries to make a reservation by mail but is quickly rejected again in a reply addressed to Professor Hamburg.24

  Humbert also notes that the Enchanted Hunters has “NO DOGS” and “NEAR CHURCHES” stamped on its stationery. “No Dogs” was typically shorthand indicating that Jews and Negroes were also not welcome—although the full phrase “No Dogs, No Coloreds, No Jews” was still used in the United States into and beyond the 1960s.25 Humbert keenly recalls the dog he had seen in the lobby on his first visit with Lolita, and wonders perhaps if it had been baptized.

  In case “No Dogs” proved too subtle, “Near Churches” was a phrase even more directly understood in the era to mean that Jews were not allowed.26 During the time period that Nabokov worked on Lolita—as he looked through listings for summer lodging for butterfly hunting trips with Véra—the same wording appeared in more than a thousand resort ads in The New York Times alone.

  The words had come into popular use only after more directly discriminatory language had been outlawed. They were so clearly a mark of bigotry that while Nabokov sat in Ithaca working on Lolita, the Anti-Defamation League brought an official complaint in the State of New York. A four-month battle raged in New York newspapers, with representatives of Catholic churches claiming that the wording was not intended to be detrimental to Jews and a group of travel agents countering that “the general public understands the ‘code’ implicit in such expressions … and that vacationers need not apply for accommodations if they happen to be Jewish.”27