by Robert Roper
In early August they were in New York. Walter Minton, president of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, the Lolita publisher, was throwing a press reception at the Harvard Club, and the author was the celebrity attraction. Minton was an “excellent publisher24,” Véra decided, someone who spent freely on “beautiful ads,” and the book his house produced was itself beautiful, with a cover that the Nabokovs found tasteful (no image of the little girl). On August 18 Minton sent them a telegram:
EVERYBODY TALKING25 OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS.
Sales figures were immediately large. In the first four days, there were 6,777 reorders26 from retailers running out of copies, and by the end of September Lolita was number one on the New York Times27 bestseller list, where it remained for seven weeks.
At Minton’s party Vladimir was “a tremendous success … amusing, brilliant and—thank God—did not say what he thinks of some famous contemporaries,” Véra recorded. This party was a foretaste of gala events in Paris, London, and Rome the following year at which the author and his demurely glamorous, long-necked wife, with her snowy hair and comme il faut outfits (a black moiré28 dress and mink stole in Paris), graciously displayed themselves. The sales and succès d’estime of Lolita made Nabokov a new world celebrity. He had squared the circle, written a challenging work that was also an alluring sex book, still, at the time of its U.S. publication, under restriction29 in Britain and France. F. W. Dupee, a professor at Columbia and a freelance critic, called Lolita a “magnificently outrageous30 novel,” also a “little masterpiece,” also “a formidable addition to popular mythology.” By mythology he meant that other stories had attached to the novel’s story. The main one was the tale of the book’s path to publication: how respectable New York houses had fled from it, how the brilliant author had had to send his manuscript to Paris, where a semi-pornographer had taken it on, and how the shunned work was now a “prodigy31 of the … business,” “not only a novel but a phenomenon.”
Those who now embraced Lolita included “all the brows32—high, middle, and low,” categories of reader not used to “celebrating together,” Dupee wrote. The book had had “the luck33 to make its American appearance at just the right moment. The state of literary feeling … has been undergoing … a change here during the past year,” and Lolita had “both profited by the change and helped to crystallise it.”
Dupee was trying—more successfully than any other early commentator—to locate what was large in the little masterpiece. The author was an unlikely source for a change in national temper, Dupee thought: he was a foreigner, to begin with, serenely out of step with a postwar turn34 that Dupee half-deplored, a “gone native” movement that believed in local traditions and hoped to place morality at the center of American literary discourse. “Into this situation35 Nabokov failed to fit at all.” Nor was his pre-Lolita reputation promising—“admirable but rather scattered” work that “seemed to belong to the … obsolescent category of avant-garde writing.”
Dupee, a mordant person36 who knew how to enjoy himself, found a rich new taste in the book. “It has helped to make the fading smile37 of the Eisenhower Age give way to a terrible grin,” he wrote, and this death’s-head imagery might have been the best way he could find to suggest the wrenchingly disparate moods of the book, moods of “disgust and horror” but also of a weird, writhing mirth, darkly knowing, scathingly sophisticated. (“The book, they tend to say, is not pornography, having no four-letter words in it. And again Humbert Humbert can be heard38 to laugh.”) Dupee had been waiting a long time to catch this new tone. Lolita was a book “too shocking39 for any great tradition to want to own,” but he owned it; it answered something needful in him.
On September 13, a friend phoned the Nabokovs to congratulate them on what he had just read in the40 Times: that movie rights had been sold to Stanley Kubrick for $150,000. That was a phenomenal sum41 in ’58. Along with royalties soon to begin flooding in, it was far more than Nabokov had earned from all his previous work as a professional writer. In the diary Véra noted, “V. supremely indifferent—occupied with a new story, and with the spreading of some 2000 butterflies.” Probably he was not indifferent. The page-a-day preserves the mood of those weeks; Vladimir thought Véra’s account was “important42” to have, a kind of scientific field note, but it was his splashy success (and hers), hard-won after a long struggle, and it mattered to them. Inquiries43 from “movie companies and agents, letters from fans etc.” kept coming, along with requests for interviews. All this “ought to have happened44 thirty years ago,” Nabokov wrote his sister, adding, “I don’t think I shall need to teach any more.”
A team from45 Life came to Ithaca, led by staff writer Paul O’Neil and photographer Carl Mydans. Véra’s account is amused but quietly thrilled—both Nabokovs knew the meaning of being portrayed in Life’s pages. “To think that three years ago,” she wrote, “people like Covici, Laughlin, and … the Bishops strongly advised V. never to publish Lolita, because … ‘all the churches, the women’s clubs [would] crack down on you.’ ” Now a Mrs. Hagen from the local Presbyterian church had called to ask if Vladimir would address their women’s group. Delicious irony! Yet the others had not been wrong: to have published four years before would have been to serve up another victim, probably, Lolita and its author sharing the fate of Wilson with Memoirs of Hecate County. The book’s having gone first to France46, where its louche publisher fought early censorship battles, had contributed to the cultural shift that F. W. Dupee praised. Lolita had birthed its own birthing.
They “could not believe47 our ears,” Véra wrote when, on Sunday, December 7, they saw on The Steve Allen Show a skit about “new ‘scientific’ toys. Last item: doll-girl who can do ‘everything, oh but everything.’ … ‘We shall send this doll to Mr. Nabokov.’ We both heard it distinctly.”
And on Dean Martin’s show48, the singer explained that he had gone to Vegas but had had nothing to do because “he did not gamble. So he sat in the lobby and read … children’s books—Polyanna, The Bobsie Twins, Lolita.”
Furthermore, “In his first show of the new year … Milton Berle49 opened with … ‘First of all let me congratulate Lolita: she is 13 now.’ ” And Groucho Marx was heard to say, “I’ve put off reading Lolita for six years, till she’s eighteen.”
For his own first TV appearance50, Nabokov went to Manhattan to be filmed for a Canadian show, hosted by CBC personality Pierre Berton and featuring scholar-critic Lionel Trilling, a fan of Lolita. Véra and Dmitri were in the studio. Dmitri felt proud of his father, and Véra thought that her husband “spoke beautifully.” “Then the warning came: Stand by! … three minutes left … two … one …” The stage set suggests a writer’s study, or a Vincent Price movie version of one, with a candelabra on a table, a sofa, statuary, books on shelves. The celebrity novelist has a rumpled look. At fifty-nine he has a thick, powerful neck and is mostly bald, but unwrinkled. Trilling, a slighter, younger man, looks older, troubled, brooding. He smokes throughout.
“On they were,” Véra recorded, and her hero proves an “ideal guest” (so the producers said), magnanimous toward those willing to try his book while dismissive of “bigots and philistines.” He retails stock Nabokovian ideas. He is not interested in producing emotions in his readers, nor in filling their heads with ideas. “I leave the field of ideas to Doctor Schweitzer and Doctor Zhivago,” he says, Doctor Zhivago, recently published, being an irritant to Nabokov, who considered it trash and its publication in the West an obvious Soviet ploy51. (Supposedly anti-Communist, it did not go far enough, the Nabokovs felt.) Instead of emotions, Vladimir says he wants readers to get “that little sob in the spine,” the flash of aesthetic bliss, when reading his work, and the chat-show host cannot let this statement pass: he asks Trilling52 if he felt no emotions when he read the book, and Trilling says, “I foun
d it a deeply moving book… . Mister Nabokov may not have meant to move hearts, but he moved mine.”
Nabokov denies any satirical intent. He is not criticizing America, “holding up the public abuses to ridicule.” Trilling replies, “But there is an underlying tone53 of satire through the book,” and, “we can’t trust a creative writer to say what he has done; he can say what he meant to do, and even then we don’t have to believe him.”
Both men are a bit sententious. This was the only filmed interview, as well as the last interview of any kind, for which Nabokov did not insist on the submission of all questions in advance, thus it provides as unscripted and in vivo an impression of the author as exists. Even so, he has a bunch of cards in his lap on which he has written phrases; when he can, he quotes himself54.
Nabokov grins behind Trilling’s back. He grins when the critic says that we can’t trust writers to do what they say; there is at least the possibility that he is grinning also because he knows that much of the ower of his novel is due to a social critique, a deep and excoriating one, a critique that has caused “terrible grins” to appear on many American faces. A darkly dissident cultural skepticism comes into play with Lolita. The extent of it will become clear over the next decade and a half, and tonal similarities abound—in the movies, in productions like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1961) and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), and in literature and other cultural domains touched by the roiling intensity now associated with the term “the sixties.” Alert readers pick something up. The suburban world of Ramsdale and Beardsley, Charlotte Haze’s taste-free house, the forties roadside reality of motor courts and mindless miles racked up: Nabokov had done his homework, and for him to insist on an imaginary America, an America “just as fantastic as any inventor’s,” conjured in his workshop and not based on the observable world (“It was fun to breed her in my own laboratory,” he says), came across as fussy and false.
He had looked around him and recognized a curious, half-asleep people—a perky populace with gloomy secrets, inhabiting a magnificent landscape that it tended to crap up, prone to stifling social norms best depicted via caustic comedy. Gunplay would arrive in the last act, as it did in so many of the nation’s stories. Sex would be the springboard for all else—nonstandard, indeed perverted, sex, because the country in its youthful aspect was fresh and sexy but also strapped in with prohibitions. The author swore he had no reforming purpose, did not wish to cause any sort of “awakening,” and in this he can be trusted: America for a writer of his kind was perfect as found.
Trilling maintains a dignified stillness. Nabokov twists, lunges, and half-reclines on the sofa55, his ovoid head angling and swiveling. He grins again when Trilling, trying to explain what is “shocking” about the book (“a young girl, someone56 … usually preserved from the sexual attentions of men; a very young girl, of twelve as I recall”), seems to be fighting a grin of his own, and Nabokov casts a look at the moderator: “Is he not licking his lips, sir? Oh, I fear your distinguished critic has read my book in the wrong way, just a little!”
Peter Sellers’s scrutiny of this documentary footage, as he prepared to play Clare Quilty in Kubrick’s film—and his liberal quoting from it, in the three roles he played later in Dr. Strangelove—is hard to gainsay57. Dr. Zempf, a school psychologist (Quilty in disguise), borrows Trilling’s biting way with certain loaded words (“sex,” “sexual”), and Trilling’s way with a cigarette, reminiscent of Edward R. Murrow’s, includes both the usual forefinger/middle-finger wedge and a much more peculiar (in the American context) thumb/forefinger grip, the smoking tip pointing upward. Sellers works brilliant changes on this when Dr. Strangelove58, in the later movie, explains the Doomsday Machine. The pomposity of the whole encounter seems to have galvanized Sellers and his director: the two clubby men of letters talking about sex with a comely child, almost giggling despite themselves; Nabokov modestly admitting that, yes, he is an expert on clinical pedophilia and on butterflies, in addition to being a great writer; Trilling with his hollow-eyed stare, looking like a man who has just gotten bad news from his gastroenterologist.
Both men are also appealing. Trilling loses his lugubriousness when he talks about the novel, which has truly excited him: he has been touched by the girl’s plight, by the tragic trajectory, by passages of sad tenderness. We suspect he even laughed at the wicked parts. And Nabokov connects, despite all his squirming. Even on this comical stage set, typecast as a condescending aesthete, he peers repeatedly from behind the mask, wanting to make contact with whoever may be out there. Shamelessly he plays the great man, but every now and then a beautiful, boyish smile59 breaks out on his big face—vulnerable, wholehearted, it is the smile of someone never far from helpless laughter.
* And soon to fall behind Nevada as the population of Las Vegas boomed. Wyoming was also the American mountain heartland, another reason that it thrilled the Nabokovs: the Tetons include the most totemic and challenging mountaineering peaks to be found in the American Rockies.
† From Gogol, who was badly thrown off by the success of The Government Inspector and of Dead Souls—disturbed by the critics who misunderstood his work—Nabokov learned to be willing to disappoint, willing to confound readers who had loved him perhaps too much, or for the wrong reasons—always to push on and not to apologize.
17.
A truly shocking incident (Véra seems to have been shocked, possibly because her own son was involved):
In New York on Tuesday, November 25, the day before the TV shoot, the Nabokovs had dinner with publisher Walter Minton at a restaurant on Third Avenue, Café Chambord1, a well-known theatrical hangout. Minton’s wife2, Polly, came too. The Mintons were in a bad way. A “slithery-blithery onetime Latin Quarter showgirl3” had become a “fast friend” of the publisher, and Mrs. Minton had learned of the affair only the previous week—via an article in Time. Polly was distraught, in pain. “She is a pretty girl,” Véra wrote in the page-a-day diary, “frightened, bewildered,” a wholesome mother of three. The couple had been happy till Lolita came along, Polly said, “for that was when Walter4 began to see a lot of people and get mixed up” in the tornado around the novel. It was even more baroque5 than that: Minton’s lover was the person who had first brought Lolita to his attention (he had been unaware of its existence till June ’57, despite the Paris edition) and was therefore owed a finder’s fee, per Putnam’s acquisitions policy.
That Polly would display her deep pain to “a perfect stranger” unnerved Véra, a much more reserved quantity. Then Dmitri showed up. He had been at the weekly meeting of his Army unit; the dining party walked around the corner for a look at his latest car, a ’57 MG6 that even his mother admitted was “a little beauty.” Polly Minton asked for a ride in it. Dmitri zoomed off with her, and Minton and the Nabokovs then took a cab to their hotel, where, as Véra noted in diary lines she later crossed through, “we three sat and waited and waited.” Minton, another confessional American, had told them in the cab that in addition to his showgirl he had been carrying on with the writer of the Time article, a woman who had taken the opportunity to score off her rival in przint, calling her a “superannuated7 … nymphet [with] a bubbly smile on her face.” “Between his two little harlots,” Véra wrote solemnly, “M[inton] ruined his family life.” He spoke “quite openly” within the cabdriver’s hearing, too. “Amazing Americans!” she concluded.
Dmitri and 1957 MGA
And still they waited. Maybe the joyriders had gotten in an accident. “Finally, they did come.” The Mintons left, then “Dmitri, with a sly smile, informed us that they had driven straight to his home from the restaurant, put the car in the garage, then—he had to get something from his flat, Polly wanted to see his flat (after having seen his car) and so on…”
“And next day,” Véra wrote, “Minton told V., ‘I hear Dmitri gave Polly a good time last night.’ ” Slightly aghast, she concluded, “I wonder if this sort of thing8 is normal or typical of today’s America? A bad novel by some O’
Hara or Cozens suddenly come to life.”
Clearly, the publicity tornado could carry people away. The excitement of being number one on the bestseller chart and having coinages from your book entering the language—nymphet9, for instance—could have odd consequences. Edmund Wilson remarked on the strange “rampancy10” of Lolita, which “evidently struck a deep chord in the great American breast.” Its lurid aspect attracted readers and made many find it revelatory. America was lurid; its literature had long been a bearer of sensational news, particularly sensational sexual news. The bestselling novel of the American fifties, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place11 (1956)—a book that Nabokov amusingly claimed never to have heard of—was its steamy twin. Both found sexy secrets behind facades of tame normalcy; both featured a stepfather raping a daughter; both had a New Hampshire12 setting. There was also murder in both, and rampant lust. Part of the comedy of Lolita is that refined Continental Humbert finds himself in such a text, up to his neck in potboiler elements. Not everyone cared that the book was a parody.
The interviews, the constant trips to New York, new concerns about foreign editions and how to deal with so much sudden income made it wise, as well as attractive, to set down the burden of teaching. Nabokov requested a year’s leave, and Cornell granted it, on condition that he find someone13 to take over his courses. On November 16, Doctor Zhivago became the number-one bestseller in the Times. Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize14 in October, a spur to sales, and Lolita was just behind Zhivago on the list for the next few months. Another whopping payout came from the sale of paperback rights ($100,00015) in mid-November, and Véra, trying to vet the complicated movie-sale contract and aware, in a general sense, of looming tax problems, spoke to law professors16 at Cornell and to the contracts specialist at Putnam’s, and in early ’59 she sought counsel at Paul, Weiss17, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in Manhattan. The Nabokovs were unnerved not only by an impending change in tax bracket. They had lived through two ruinous inflations, one after the Revolution and another in Weimar Berlin, and Vladimir, in the days just after the movie sale, requested that his publisher pay half his earnings in “government bonds18 or other safe stock” as an inflation hedge.