Maurice Girodias, Vladimir Nabokov and Lolita
Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press, was the first to publish Lolita. In September 1965 the Evergreen Review (Evergreen #37) published an article by Girodias entitled Lolita, Nabokov and I, which was Girodias’ accounting of the events surrounding the publication of Nabokov’s novel. What followed was a exchange, in Evergreen #45 and #47 between the always clever Nabokov and Girodias (Links below).
Nabokov:
“I had not been in Europe since 1940, was not interested in pornographic books, and thus knew nothing about the obscene novelettes which Mr. Girodias was hiring hacks to confect with his assistance, as he relates elsewhere. I have pondered the painful question whether I would have agreed so cheerfully to his publishing Lolita had I been aware in May, 1955, of what formed the supple backbone of his production. Alas, I probably would, though less cheerfully.”
“But I must also point out to him that he was not the right person to undertake the thing; he lacked the means to launch Lolita properly – a book that differed so utterly in vocabulary, structure, and purpose (or rather absence of purpose) from his other much simpler commercial ventures, such as Debby’s Bidet or Tender Thighs.”
http://www.evergreenreview.com/100/nabokov.html
Girodias:
“Then – not everyone has the privilege of acceding during one’s lifetime to Nabokov’s inverted Pantheon! Nabokov’s victims have always been anonymous, at best pseudonymous: am I really the first of the great man’s fantasies of hate to be identified with a live person?
Am I really – could I really be! – that delirious, evil character, that chameleonic tormentor? Draped in “an aura of negligence, evasiveness, procrastination and falsity,” did I conspire to capture my helpless, struggling Nabokov in “a tissue of haggling manoeuvres and abstruse prevarications“? Did I haunt him in dark recesses “with the sneer of a hoodlum following an innocent passerby“? As a “flexible memoirist” (animated with “undulatory motions“), was I guilty of those countless “insolent and vulgar remarks,” those “idiotic insinuations” peppered with “nasty and silly passages” and freely disgorging “discrepancies typical of apocrypha,” not to mention the mere “guileful inexactitudes“? (Unless otherwise occupied in concocting “obscene novelettes” in the company of snivelling hacks – couched, that goes without saying, “in intolerably bad English”?) How far can one go? Could that remarkable person be me? Would those darkest “depths of my personality” be the cause of Nabokov’s “obligation to endure the elusiveness, the procrastination (sic…), the dodges, the duplicity, and the utter irresponsibility of the man“?”
