This Day in Literary History (Nabokov’s “Lolita” Published in U.S.)

August 18, 1958—Taking a chance that four other American publishers had passed on, G.P. Putnam published Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, without disruption. 

In fact, the novel would not face the same legal difficulties that had bedeviled it in Europe, where the authorities in Great Britain and France imposed censorship bans because of Nabokov’s explosive subject: pedophilia. Just remember to tell that to the next jaded Continental who kvetches about us “puritanical Americans”!

The novel almost didn’t see the light of day at all:

1) After “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov carried his manuscript and all his notecards out to the incinerator behind his house before his wife Vera prevailed on him not to give up on the project.

2) Just finding a publisher became an ordeal. Despite the reputation he earned as a superb stylist in his memoir Speak, Memory (1948), the Russian émigré’s 12th novel (and his third in English) was considered radioactive. Nabokov had to go to Paris to find a publisher: Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press. The author was evidently unaware of Girodias’ reputation as a self-described “gentleman-pornographer”—someone who not only published the likes of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, and John Cleland, but also figures with less literary, far raunchier content.

The tale of Humbert Humbert and his infatuation with nymphet Dolores Haze—aka Lolita—caused considerable consternation in Europe. 

Publishing an English-language title in Paris might have seemed at the time a surefire way to slip the book under the censors’ radar, but it didn’t work—the book ended up banned for two years. 

In England, while one critic called it “the filthiest book I have ever read” (probably ensuring at least another 5,000 copies sold), novelist Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year.

(Greene’s praise was not necessarily an unalloyed blessing. British readers with long memories would have recalled the novelist’s controversial comment over 20 years ago in his job as a film critic, where comments on Shirley Temple’s “dimpled depravity” and “neat and well-muscled rump” put him in the crosshairs of a libel suit by Twentieth Century Fox.)

All of this hullabaloo ensured that Lolita found a receptive audience when it was published stateside. It sold 2,600 copies on its first day in the bookstores and 100,000 copies in its first three months of publication, duplicating Gone With the Wind’s startling achievement of two decades earlier.

I first read the novel in Ann Douglas’ excellent Postwar American Literature class at Columbia University in 1982. 

I was unprepared for one aspect of its structure: it’s a road novel. It didn’t strike me at the time, but it followed by a year another novel in that course in which a protagonist took to America’s highways: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (In fact, a CNN story on Lolita even includes an interactive map.)

The émigré Nabokov’s take on America is far less Whitmanesque, far more satiric than Kerouac’s. The country that the European intellectual Humbert discovers is, like Lolita herself, innocent if somewhat trashy. 

It was a nation that was already experimenting with the motels and strip centers that proliferated. especially once the interstate highway system (created only a couple of years before) came into its own.

Nabokov—a frequent road traveler himself in pursuit of his hobby of collecting butterflies—was so inspired by the oddball names he discovered in atlases that he came up with shameless puns such as this: “We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop 1,001.”

(Speaking of Soda…Do you think that George Costanza of Seinfeld might have read this novel? At first, I might have said no. Portnoy’s Complaint would have been too close for comfort; Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillane, with their lack of artistry, would have appealed to someone like him who never let grace get in the way of a move on a woman, as witnessed his pursuit of Marisa Tomei. But if not from Nabokov, what the heck else could have inspired Seinfeld’s Sancho Panza to provide a couple with the name “Soda” for their child?)

Lolita was not the first major American novel to treat child molestation—in the 1930s, Nicole Diver of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night and Gloria Wandrous of John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 were both abuse victims. 

But these books featured third-person narrators who considered the victims as adults suffering the aftereffects of abuse. That increases the distance and coolness with which readers view the sordid events.

In contrast, Lolita makes it impossible to turn away:

* The female victim is not an adult looking back, but a pre-pubescent;
* The elaborate seduction and subsequent acts are described rather than summarized or implied;
* The narrator is the predator himself, who employs humor and even addresses the reader as “Brother” on at least one occasion—a wheedling attempt at self-justification by a man who comes to indict himself more for robbing a girl's innocence than for murdering an even worse pervert (Clare Quilty) than himself.

The name “Lolita” has become synonymous with young girls of dangerously budding sexuality. Amy Fisher, of course, was the “Long Island Lolita”; Sharon Stone’s daughter in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, who disorients Bill Murray with her lack of clothing, also is named after the Nabokov character.

And, despite his disdain for Freud, Nabokov has become the paramount creator of a psychological type, in the same manner that Machiavelli now stands for a style of politics removed from standards of morality or behavior. 

In “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” the main character in the song by The Police “starts to shake and cough/Just like the old man in/That book by Nabokov.” (A slight error—Humbert is middle-aged—but the idea of a dirty old man appeals to the common stereotype in this type of case.)

One last note: Nabokov might have drawn at least some of his inspiration from a real-life case involving a New Jersey girl, according to Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin of the University of Wisconsin. 

Florence Sally Horner, an 11-year-old Camden girl, was blackmailed by middle-aged car mechanic Frank LaSalle, who had caught her shoplifting a five-cent notebook. The two then spent the next 21 months on the road, like Humbert and Lolita, before Horner turned in her kidnapper.

In her attempt to regain a normal life, Lolita died in childbirth; Sally Horner’s life also ended tragically with her death in an auto accident at age 15. LaSalle—euphemistically called a “moral leper” by the judge—received a 30-35 year prison sentence for kidnapping.