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Chapter One. the CREATION of LOLITA

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Chapter One. the CREATION of LOLITA The Creation of Lolita Chapter One THE CREATION OF LOLITA Vladimir Nabokov declared that the “first little throb” of Lolita went through him in 1939 or early 1940 when he was living in Paris (“On a Book Entitled Lolita”; L 311). As we shall see below, however, the specific theme of an older man being attracted to a much younger woman (or girl) long predates this period in Nabokov’s life. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1939 Nabokov sat down to write his first extended treatment of the Lolita plot: an adult man marries a widow in order to gain access to the widow’s young daughter. This tale, entitled The Enchanter (Volshebnik in Russian), was written from a very different perspective than Lolita. The story of the protagonist’s obsession in The Enchanter is told from an external, third-person point of view, whereas Lolita is narrated by the obsessed man himself, and this shift in point of view opened up for Nabokov the opportunity to attempt his daring artistic experiment: he allows his abhorrent criminal protagonist the chance to plead his own case and to cloak his beastly crimes in language and images that are as intriguing as they are disturbing. Nabokov perhaps had this later perspective in mind when he expanded upon his remark about his “initial throb.” He states that this “initial shiver of inspiration” was prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who was coaxed by a researcher into producing a charcoal drawing. The drawing showed the bars of the “poor creature’s cage” (L 311). If this story has any relevance to Lolita (and curiously, no one has been able to identify the original source of the story, although Brian Boyd speculates that Nabokov may have seen a photograph of a chim- panzee in a London zoo with a paintbrush in his hand1), then it is surely the image of an imprisoned beast drawing the bars of his own cage. Humbert’s narrative not only depicts the chastened criminal locked in prison awaiting trial, but the very words out of which he constructs his narrative form, in a metaphorical sense, the bars of his cage. As he writes in an imagined address to Dolly: “I have only words to play with” (L 32). 3 Chapter One Nabokov was unable to publish The Enchanter at the time of its com- position, and although he rediscovered the manuscript years later, it did not see the light of day until after his death: it was not published until 1986. Perhaps the failure of this text to appear in print in 1939 or 1940 was fortuitous, for when Nabokov began thinking about the theme again at the end of the 1940s, he did not have to worry about repeating himself in print. His first mention of a new work in progress in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1947 reveals little. He merely states: “I am writing two new things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls — and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea — and 2. a new type of autobiography” (NWL 215; the second project would turn into Speak, Memory). A subse- quent description of the novel in a letter to Pascal Covici in 1951 provides a bit more specificity: “I am engaged in the composition of a novel, which deals with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of thirteen” (SL 128). Between these two points, as Nabokov himself put it, he was faced with the difficult task of “inventing America” (L 312). To ground his story of a middle-aged European man pursuing a young American girl in the details of “real” life, Nabokov conducted research into every aspect of this story. Brian Boyd’s biography of Nabokov sets forth the kinds of material Nabokov perused and the extent to which he sought specificity for the social and psychological milieu he would create in his novel. He rode local buses to record the way schoolgirls talked with one another. He read manuals on the physical and emotional maturation of ado- lescent girls. He studied gun catalogues, read teenage magazines, learned the titles of popular songs, and perused Havelock Ellis.2 During his journeys across the country in the late 1940s and early 1950s he gathered material for his description of Humbert’s and Dolly’s own cross-country trips. Speaking engagements for women’s groups gave him ideas on how to fill in the portrait of Dolly’s mother Charlotte. A night at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto prompted him to record the nerve-jarring noises of the place in images that would find their way into his novel, including “the violent waterfalls of one’s neighbor’s toilet.”3 He read with interest newspaper accounts about the fate of a girl named Florence Sally Horner who had been abducted as an eleven-year-old by a fifty-year-old mechanic named Frank La Salle and kept as a “cross-country love slave” for twenty-one months. As Alexander Dolinin has persuasively demonstrated, Nabo kov used key details from this incident in Lolita, and he even has Humbert refer to the incident by name (L 289).4 4 The Creation of Lolita Despite his intense work on the project, he occasionally despaired of its ultimate success and, on more than one occasion, he was ready to destroy the notes he had made for the novel. In his essay on Lolita he writes that once or twice he was on the point of burning the unfinished draft but was stopped “by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” (L 312). Nabokov’s wife Véra played a key role in this rescue: upon at least one occasion, she saved his papers from the flame.5 The work proceeded slowly, and if he had written a draft of the first twelve chapters of Part One and several passages from Part Two by mid- 1950, it was not until December 6, 1953 that he would write in his diary: “Finished Lolita which was begun exactly 5 years ago.”6 Having completed the daunting task of writing the novel, Nabokov now faced the similarly daunting challenge of finding a publisher for the work. Concerned about the security of his teaching position at Cornell, he initially explored the idea of publishing the novel under a pseudonym, but the publishers he contacted discouraged this idea. Nor were they themselves willing to undertake the risk of publishing what would surely be seen as a controversial work. Nabokov approached five American pub- lishers — Viking Press; Simon and Schuster; New Directions; Farrar, Straus and Young; and Doubleday — but all turned him down; several were fearful of the complications that would ensue if the book were to be banned at its release. Nabokov also contacted an agent in France, Doussia Ergaz, to see if she might be able to find a publisher there, and she had better luck. In April 1955 she met Maurice Girodias, the owner of Olympia Press. Unlike his American counterparts, Girodias was happy to take on Nabokov’s project, but the reason for this was apparently not obvious to Ergaz, and certainly not to Nabokov. Eager for success as a publisher, Girodias took under his wing a broad assortment of literature, from works by Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller to outright pornography. In fact, a large number of his titles were targeted at the English-speaking traveler looking for erotica. Several years later, Nabokov wrote that he subsequently pondered the question of whether he would have agreed “so cheerfully” to Girodias publishing Lolita if he had been aware of “what formed the supple backbone of his production.” “Alas,” he writes, “I probably would, though less cheerfully” (SO 271). Cheerfully or not, Nabokov signed a contract with Girodias in June 1955, and the book appeared in two slender paperback volumes in September of that year. Given its humble origins and the unlikely company in which it was published (other titles produced by Olympia at the time included Until She Screams and How To Do It), Lolita might easily have languished in obscurity 5 Chapter One if Graham Greene had not named it one of the best books of 1955 in the Christmas edition of London Sunday Times. This declaration led others to look for a copy of the book, and one of those who did, John Gordon, wrote a searing rebuke to Greene in the London Sunday Express at the end of January 1956. Asking “Has Mr. Graham Greene...been pulling the leg of the sedate Sunday Times?” Gordon denounced Lolita as “the filthiest book” he had ever read and “[s]heer unrestrained pornography.” He further declared that anyone who published the novel in England would surely go to prison, and he scolded the Sunday Times for “stepping into the business” of publicizing pornography.7 Greene reacted to Gordon’s criticism with a cutting rebuke of his own in February 1956, and a bracing controversy began percolating. Readers in the United States became acquainted with the dispute when Harvey Breit reported the Greene-Gordon fracas in the New York Times Book Review at the end of February, although he identified Lolita only as a “long French novel about nymphets” with no author’s name attached to it.8 Breit followed up the story a month later, with more detail about the novel sent to him by reader, and this time he named its author.9 Nabokov was concerned about the charge that his work was porno- graphic, and he defended his work in nearly identical terms in two letters written in March 1956 (one to Morris Bishop and one to Pascal Covici): “I know that Lolita is my best work so far.
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