`LO. Lee. Ta. Did she have a precursor?'
Ha'aretz - Israel
... each was offered the manuscript - not to publish a novel entitled "Lolita,"
written by a distinguished professor of literature by the name of Vladimir
Nabokov. ...
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/461251.html>

`Lo. Lee. Ta. Did she have a precursor?'

Fri., August 06, 2004 Av 19, 5764

By Michael Handelzalts

She did, indeed she did

Fifty years ago four respected American publishers considered it, and found literary merit in it, but decided - after each was offered the manuscript - not to publish a novel entitled "Lolita," written by a distinguished professor of literature by the name of Vladimir Nabokov. The justification was that the subject matter - concerning a mature white, single male (the narrator), who was being seduced by a "nymphet" - could cause legal and moral problems.

Oddly enough, in these times of free speech and a progressive, modern approach to morality and literature, and in the absence of any censorship, at least in the democratic West - it seems that a book that is sympathetic to a pedophile would raise many more eyebrows. But that is another matter.

Who was she, and whence came she? The answers seem to be unequivocal, set in the beautifully alliterative first paragraph: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. ... Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did."

The precursor was not only the one certain, initial girl that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, loved in the princedom by the sea, one Annabel. The German scholar Prof. Michael Maar wrote in March (in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in English in The Times Literary Supplement) that Heinz von Lichberg - who subsequently became, under his real name, Heinz von Eshwege, a Nazi radio commentator, - published an 18-page story entitled "Lolita" in an obscure collection of stories called "Accursed Gioconda" in 1916. It was a story of a male lodger seduced by the prepubescent daughter - the eponymous Lolita - of the landlord. Maar is confident than Nabokov, who lived in Berlin when the story was published, read it a long time before he completed the first version of his own story, in Russian, in 1939, and before he turned it into a full-length novel in English in 1954.

But Maar does not think it was a case of plagiarism by Nabokov. He thinks it was a case of "cryptomnesia," a term Karl Jung used when he found traces of a story by the German poet Justinus Kerner in Nietsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Nabokov forgot that he should have remembered a story he had read once. He thought that he was inventing it.

Failing to find a publisher for his book in the United States, Nabokov enlisted help from his literary agent in Europe, and she put him in touch with Olympia Press in Paris. The publisher Maurice Girodias was more than happy to have on his list a book "about which I had so often dreamed but never found: the treatment of one of the major forbidden human passions in a manner both completely sincere and absolutely legitimate." The book was published in English in Paris in September 1955. Nabokov was not aware at that time that Girodias had on his list books by Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, and also volumes entitled "Debbie's Bidet" and "Tender Thighs."

Then Graham Greene named the book as one of his books of the year for 1955 in the TLS. John Gardner in The Daily Express denounced it as "sheer unrestrained pornography." The British government, which had an account to settle with Girodias, who was smuggling printed pornography into England, prodded the French Home Office to ban the sale of "Lolita" in France. Girodias, unaided by Nabokov, who preferred to sit on the lines and remain impartial, fought the ban in the courts and won. The U.S. Customs Service - surprisingly and wisely, after checking the contents of the volume in question - did not stop the import of the book's translation in English into the U.S.

By 1958 the time was ripe for publication of the book in the U.S. By then relations between Girodias and Nabokov had become strained for the very simple reason that the publisher was rather neglectful in providing royalty statements and monies due.

Walter Minton, the president of Putnam's, acquired the American rights to the book. It became an American best-seller for seven weeks in 1958. In 1950 Nabokov unilaterally terminated his contract with Girodias.

Local angle

The English edition of "Lolita" that I hold in my hand carries the imprint of the Olympia Press. It was printed in Israel for Olympia by Steimatzky's Agency, by Offset Sh. Monson, Jerusalem. "Export of this edition is prohibited in Israel," it says there.

Eri Steimatzky was in high school at the end of the 1950s. He remembers that at that time, Israel had no foreign currency to spare. Importing books was out of the question. His father, Yehezkel, came up with the idea of printing English best-sellers in Israel. The first book in the series was "Dr. Zhivago". The second book was "Lolita," and this is the only volume of the 70 in the English-language series that Steimatzky does not have in his collection. He offered to buy my copy.

In the `60s, Girodias and Nabokov exchanged lengthy and heated arguments in the Evergreen Review. There was no love lost between the two, and both of their imaginations and memories and senses of ironies worked, it seems, in overdrive. Among other things, Girodias wrote (about his strained relations with the author in 1959): "Three weeks later I received a letter from Minton chiding me for having given my agreement to sell the Israeli rights for `Lolita' to a man named Steimatzky. I had nothing to do with that as it had been Mrs. Nabokov herself who had insisted on having us offer the rights to Steimatzky. I said so but nobody thought of apologizing to me for that silly incident."

That is one of the very few points on which Nabokov did not comment.

In May of this year the TLS reviewed Vera Nabokov's biography. One Brian Gilmore wrote a letter, which was printed, telling readers that when his father was a child, a Russian student stayed in their house. Gilmore's aunt, Lottie, 11 at that time, helped Vladdie - that was the student's name, he lived in her room - catch butterflies. Gilmore raised the possibility (based on his fathers' stories) that Aunt Lottie served as the inspiration for Lolita.

In July Gilmore asked the readers to disregard his first letter. His aunt asked him to write the following clarification: "She wants me to emphasize that he (the Cambridge student) was the epitome of propriety and correct behavior. She had a serious row with her brother (my father) when he made `those scandalous allegations and imputations,' adding that `he was nothing but a scoundrel and a blackguard'".

Don't think for a moment that this is a laughing matter. Gilmore concludes: "I would be most grateful if you would publish this corrective letter as my aunt has threatened to strike me from her will."

Fifty years later, Lolita's fame (and infamy?) live on.