Minton also wondered whether Lolita could, in fact, fall into the public domain. He said as much when he met the author in Ithaca, braving a snowstorm to do so. 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.”
Nabokov kept his mouth shut about these extra sales. He took more time to swallow his pride with respect to Girodias. Much as he wanted to be financially free of his former publisher—going so far as to declare the original contract null and void in light of Girodias’s inability to abide by the terms—he agreed, grudgingly, with Minton that it was better to allow Girodias a stake in Lolita’s American publication so they could be sure to get the book out as soon as possible.
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. He wrote the publisher back in early February 1958 to agree to terms (including the 50/50 royalty split with Girodias, with each receiving 7.5 percent of the hardcover proceeds). 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. Nabokov had also decided to take a leave of absence from Cornell beginning in the fall because of all of the prepublication demands for Lolita. They returned to New York in early August, in time for a press reception at the Harvard Club. Véra recorded her impressions of the evening, and of her husband, in their shared Page-a-Day diary: “Vladimir was a tremendous success . . . amusing, brilliant, and—thank God—did not say what he thinks of some famous contemporaries.”
On publication day, Minton sent the following telegram to the Nabokovs: “EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 3OO REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS.”
Minton was referring to 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 four days after its publication. By the end of September, Lolita was atop the New York Times bestseller list, having sold more than eighty thousand copies. It remained at number one for the next seven weeks. 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 new story” and with cataloging his summertime butterfly-hunting bounty. Or at least that was the guise he adopted, as described by his wife. 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 shall need to teach any more.”
Nabokov proved correct. The indefinite leave of 1958 became permanent retirement from Cornell at the end of 1959, when he was sixty. 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 shelter, sanctuary, and the source material for his most famous novel again only a handful of times.
Lolita moved far beyond the bestseller list to become a cultural and global phenomenon. The template was in place for generations of readers to be taken in by Humbert Humbert, forgetting that Dolores Haze was his victim, not his seducer.
At the time, no one noticed that Lolita was published in the United States on the sixth anniversary, to the day, of Sally’s death. And no one made the connection between fictional nymphet and real girl for several more years.
Twenty-Seven
Connecting Sally Horner to Lolita
Peter Welding was a young freelance reporter in 1963, still a few years shy of thirty. A Philadelphia native, he had already built up a solid series of bylines, mostly for music magazines like Downbeat. He was also a fledgling music producer, founding Testament Records that same year to issue old and new jazz, gospel, and blues recordings. Welding had moved to Chicago to further his producing career, but not before setting out to tell a story that unfolded across the river from his hometown.
Welding was born in 1935, two years earlier than Sally Horner; no doubt her kidnapping and rescue made a large impression on him as a teenager. Welding remembered reading of Sally’s plight in his local newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Evening Bulletin, and decided to examine the parallels between Sally’s story and Lolita. He zeroed in on the same parenthetical phrase that, decades later, first caught the attention of Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin and, then, me. He compared specific events that occurred in Lolita to what happened to Sally. The results were published in an unusual venue: the men’s magazine Nugget, racier than Esquire or GQ but more prudent than Playboy.
Image accompanying Peter Welding’s November 1963 article for Nugget.
Nugget had a knack for publishing stories with literary connections. It helped that its editor at the time was Seymour Krim, who was affiliated with the Beat Generation, hanging around with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, though unlike them, he never wrote poetry or fiction. Krim also embraced the New Journalism ethos while working at the New York Herald Tribune with future stars Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Dick Schaap. Nugget, under Krim’s editorial guidance, featured stories and articles by Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Otto Preminger, William Saroyan, Chester Himes, and Paddy Chayefsky—and that was just in 1963.
Despite shooting for high literary quality, Nugget wanted to reach a mass audience—though Krim and his staffers sabotaged their own efforts by failing to stick to a regular publishing schedule. Just five issues of Nugget appeared in 1963; Nugget’s frequency during Krim’s editorial tenure might be best described as “bimonthly-ish.” Welding’s story, “Lolita Has a Secret—Shhh!” ran in the November issue.
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bsp; The piece opened with a summary of both Lolita and Sally’s abduction, which Welding had gleaned entirely from news reports in his hometown papers, the Inquirer and Evening Bulletin. He recounted the five-and-dime meet-up, La Salle’s threat of juvenile incarceration if Sally didn’t go along with his plan, the basic outlines of the twenty-one-month-long cross-country trip, Ruth Janisch’s role as rescuer, and Sally’s eventual recovery.*
After Welding finished with his summary, he declared that the Horner case and Lolita “parallel each other much too closely to be coincidental.” Welding took particular note of Sally’s fear of being sent to reform school, which he compared to Humbert’s declaration, roughly halfway into the novel, that “the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the deepest moan of shame.” And further:
“. . . What happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? . . . So I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? . . . While I stand gripping the bars, you happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home. . . .”
Welding also drew a comparison between Humbert marrying Charlotte Haze to gain access to Dolores and La Salle claiming to be married to Sally’s mother. Welding further speculated that the actions of Humbert’s housekeeper at Beardsley, Mrs. Holigan, might be based on the actions of Ruth Janisch (“on the rare occasions where Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s, simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat”).
Finally, Welding arrived at his own smoking gun: that neon-light parenthetical late in Lolita: “in this single reference [Nabokov] has all the essentials—the full names, the ages of the pair, La Salle’s occupation, the date of the abduction— neatly packaged in one sentence,” which suggests thorough familiarity rather than casual knowledge.
Eventually Welding seemed to tire of the compare/contrast—“More parallels could easily be shown, but to what further purpose?”—but he felt confident enough to conclude: “The plot line of Lolita derives in large measure from the case and is solidly based on actual fact. . . . The conclusion is almost inescapable: Nabokov has inserted the reference to the LaSalle-Horner story either as a conscious (or unconscious) acknowledgment of a primary source material, or as a shrewd maneuver to provide himself legal protection.”
I’m not certain what Welding meant here. He didn’t elaborate further in the piece, so I can’t know for sure, but perhaps he believed, based on this statement, that lawyers, already made nervous by Lolita’s worldwide controversy, legal challenges, and publication bans, insisted Nabokov insert the reference to avoid an additional legal issue, such as a plagiarism charge.
Welding made several mistakes in his piece. First, he got Humbert’s parenthetical comment wrong, suggesting that it was from the vantage point of Mrs. Chatfield, the mother of one of Lolita’s classmates whom Humbert meets in a hotel lobby upon his return, after more than five years away, to Ramsdale. Still, Welding understood the importance of the Sally Horner aside decades before anyone else.
More baffling to me was his omission of Sally Horner’s fate from the article. Was Welding unaware that Sally died in a car accident a decade earlier? Could the “shrewd maneuver” line have referred to possible grounds for Sally to sue, had she been alive? In omitting Sally’s death, he missed an opportunity to compare her fate to Charlotte Haze’s death by car accident. What was beyond Welding’s grasp, though, was the direct proof Nabokov knew all about Sally Horner, since the transcribed and reworked wire report that is part of his archives at the Library of Congress was not available to the public in 1963.
Lastly, 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.
However, 1950 was around the time Nabokov came close to junking what was still then called The Kingdom by the Sea. 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.
THE NOVEMBER 1963 ISSUE of Nugget came and went without much notice. It attracted nowhere near the attention of the release of the film version of Lolita a month later, or the millions of sales garnered by the novel to date. But one person did pay attention: a New York Post reporter named Alan Levin.
Levin eventually became an award-winning documentary filmmaker, working with his son, Marc, and with Bill Moyers, on films shown by PBS and HBO. But he cut his journalistic teeth for the Associated Press and then joined the Post in the late 1950s, where his reporting on organized crime garnered him a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
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. Levin’s story for the Post—“Nabokov Says ‘Lolita’ Is More Art Than Life”—ran on September 18, 1963, a day after Levin received Véra’s letter.
The article began with a provocative lede: “Is it possible that Humbert Humbert was a 50-year-old Philadelphia auto mechanic and his nymphet, Lolita, an 11-year-old from Camden, NJ?” 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. Her response also carries an air of protesting too much:
Montreux, September 13, 1963
Palace Hotel
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 existence of an “invented” book. He is particularly curious as regards the meaning of Mr. Welding’s statement about “a shrewd maneuver to provide himself legal protection.” Legal protection against what?
Had he read Mr. Welding’s article, my husband might have been able to give you more pertinent comment although he fails to see what importance that article could possibly have.
Sincerely yours,
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
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. Véra, again, showed herself to be the consummate brand manager for Vladimir. Any speculation that Lolita could be inspired by a real-life case went against the single-mi
nded Nabokovian belief that art supersedes influence, and so influence must be brushed off.
How the Nabokovs handled Levin’s letter, and by extension Welding’s article for Nugget, is a window into their maddening, contradictory behavior when anyone probed Lolita’s possible influences. They denied the importance of Sally Horner but acknowledged the parenthetical. They mentioned a “considerable number” of case histories, but only Sally’s is described in the novel.
Véra’s stubborn insistence that the Sally Horner story “did not inspire the book” is akin to trying to drown out a troublesome argument with the braying of one’s own voice. Though it worked, since Levin did not push back—at least, not that we know of.
That Véra claimed the Nabokovs had not seen the Nugget piece is odd on several counts. First, the author’s main archive at the New York Public Library contains over half a dozen boxes’ worth of newspaper clippings about Lolita, starting from its original 1955 publication by Olympia Press through its American publication by Putnam in 1958, well into the 1960s and early 1970s. The Nabokovs subscribed to several clipping services based in New York and Paris. They seemed to have kept every review in every possible language they spoke or read—English, French, German, Italian, Russian—whether good or bad, critical or full of praise, defending its content or wishing the book banned from the earth.
There is also an entire box of clippings related to the Lolita film, beginning with who would be cast to play Dolores Haze. 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.
The Real Lolita Page 17