Sarah Weinman - The Real Lolita - The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

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!”