Am I alone in being puzzled by Anthony Stadlen’s questions about VN and Playboy? In the annals of smut, Playboy can’t hold a candle to the Olympia Press, which first published Lolita. If a writer is corrupted by his association with a smut peddler, it follows that VN was hopelessly compromised before Playboy ever entered the picture. More to the point, a fair percentage of highly acclaimed writers have been appearing in Playboy for well over half a century. They’ve done it for obvious reasons--money, prestige, a guaranteed wide audience, the publicity that comes with having your name prominently displayed in most of the newsstands of the world, and so on. Does this mean they’ve all entered into a “bizarre collusion” with the forces of immorality? Surely not. Writers are, on average, no more--and no less--human than the rest of us. It will be a dreary day if, a hundred years from now, not only VN but Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Alex Haley, Camille Paglia, Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm X, Jane Smiley, John Updike, Stephen Hawking, and dozens of other well-known writers, artists, and thinkers are censored for having been associated with Playboy Magazine.

It might be thought that although VN accepted the money and exposure that Playboy offered, he privately viewed Hefner and his magazine with contempt. But I can find no evidence of this in the biographies of VN and Vera. Judging from VN’s letters to Hefner that appear in Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977, he admired both the man (at least in his role as editor) and the magazine. “Playboy can be always depended upon to provide brilliant surprises,” he wrote in January 1967. A few days later, he wrote that “I always enjoy reading Playboy, and the latest issue was especially entertaining and informative.” On December 28, 1968, after expressing his pleasure that an excerpt from Ada--under the title “One Summer in Ardis”--would appear in the magazine, he added: “Have you ever noticed how the head and ears of your Bunny resemble a butterfly in shape, with an eyespot on one hindwing?” These are hardly the words of a man even mildly embarrassed, let alone smitten with remorse, at his connection to a magazine of questionable morals.

For me, at least, Anthony’s questions, which seem to have been provoked by an undergraduate’s breezy take on the matter, are easily dealt with. Unless we expect our writers to be paragons of a narrowly conceived, puritanical style of virtue, there is nothing bizarre in VN’s--and more recently Dmitri’s--association with Hefner and nothing unseemly in the choice of Playboy as publisher of a good many of VN’s works. 

It’s worth adding that Eric Naiman’s new book, Nabokov, Perversely, opens with an account of VN’s “A Nursery Story” as it appeared in the January 1974 issue of Playboy. After two pages, the story is interrupted by photos of 33 nude women. The plot of the story, whether by design or not, is thus echoed in the very format of the magazine. Although I’m still in the skip-around stage of reading it, I have no hesitation in recommending Naiman’s book. The parts I’ve read are by turns deeply insightful, highly provocative, and--if one can believe this of so scholarly a work--uproariously funny. Alas, poor Rowe. 

Jim Twiggs