Brian Boyd — Nabokov, Lolita, and a History of Censorship | Free to Speak

New Zealand banned it. So did France, Australia and South Africa, and every American publisher who saw the manuscript in 1954 turned it down. Brian Boyd, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland and the world's leading Nabokov scholar, joins Dane Giraud to trace the censorship history of the twentieth century's most contested masterpiece. 

They cover Nabokov's extraordinary life in exile, why he wrote a confession narrated by a predator, the Paris press that finally published it, Graham Greene's satirical John Gordon Society, the French ban traded over Suez, the 1958 American release that outsold everything since Gone With the Wind, the Kubrick and Lyne adaptations, and what seventy years of banning Lolita teaches us: suppression sells, and the impulse to censor never learns.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Brian Boyd

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Free to Speak, the New Zealand Free Speech Union podcast. If you enjoy the show, subscribe for uncensored conversations and free speech news from New Zealand and beyond.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Daughter, and welcome to Free to Speak, the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union. My name is Dane Giroud. I am a council member of the Union and your host, and joining us today is Brian Boyd. Brian is a professor of literature, known primarily as an expert in the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, Brian. Great. So and you're at Auckland University.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Well, I'm retired now.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Oh, retired? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Um An Emeritus. Sorry?

SPEAKER_01 0:45

An emeritus.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

An emeritus. Oh, great. Fantastic. Um, it's an honor to have you here. Um we have a little bit of history. Uh about 20 years ago or something like that, maybe 25 years ago, I read Laughter in in the dark, which was a Nabokov book, and was so overwhelmed by it that I had to speak to someone. So found your email and uh reached out and just said, My head's full of all this stuff. This is just the most amazing thing I've ever read. What should I do? And you said read the illusion defense. I think that was your uh your reply at the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yes, well, uh that that's always pro probably always my suggestion for uh for most readers to to go to as their first Nabokov. It's it's so uh so warm, so heartbreaking, uh and and so dazzling, yeah, at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

And Laughter in the Dark was was more of a uh it would be could consider a minor work, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Definitely, yes, yes. I think Nabokov thought it was the weakest of his novels, really.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Yeah, I mean, you know, if that's some that someone's weak. Still pretty good. So we're going to talk about um uh uh Nabokov's most controversial book, arguably one of the more controversial books ever written, and that's Loletta, uh, which he uh wrote in 1955, correct?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Uh, he wrote it between 1949 and 1953 and uh got it published in 1955. Fantastic, fantastic.

A Childhood Bookshop And First Lolita

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Okay, so so let's start by um maybe a little bit of background on yourself, actually. Like what brought you to Nabokov?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Um, my my parents knew I had a passion for books and they were not well educated. They uh both left school at 14 in in Belfast um in Dunganon. And uh eventually they bought a bookstore uh with a lending library attached to it to satisfy me. And uh I used to refile books and for them. And uh when I was about 12 I came across this very copy, in fact, of uh Lolita and uh saw that it was uh I realized that it was a a a dirty book and uh that it also but it also had comments in the dust jacket from Lionel Trilling, V. S. Pritchett, Graham Green, Philip Twinby and and so on, and Bernard Levine. And I thought, well, you know, this is a classic and a dirty book. So I snuck it up, snuck it home and uh hit it under my pillow and uh and and read it. It was way over my head at the time. Um but uh yeah, uh it wasn't really the start of my passion for Nbokov. I used to sort out orders for regular customers in the bookstore for magazines and uh and read everything as I was doing it, read every magazine. So Time magazine had a cover story on Nabokov in 1969 on the publication of its of Nabokov's latest novel, which is Ada. And uh I uh there was an a boxed interview inside with a uh headline and read, I have never I've never met a more lonely, more lucid, mad mind than mine. I thought that sounds interesting. So I read the interview and it just blew me away. So I had to go to the local public library, which is just around the corner in Palms North, and um find the latest of his novels available, which of course wasn't yet Arda, uh, and that was Pale Fire. And I read that following the instructor. So I was 16 by then. I'm following the the crazy cross-references, so you have about five fingers stuck in different parts of the book to try to get back to the uh original forward that you're reading. Uh, it was a it was a funny experience in itself, but it you also learn that all sorts of secrets about the the story that you're you know you're not supposed to know yet. And that was just fascinating. And so this sense of of discovery that I had with uh Pale Fire is being the thing that's kept me coming back to Nabokov. Um I then uh eventually, you well, I I did a uh a master's thesis on Nabokov and thought that, well, that that's Nabokov out of my system, and then went to Toronto for a PhD and started working on a thesis on John Bath, uh, more or less a well, uh a generation younger than Nabokov and got bored after a while and um went back to Arda, which is one of the the three books I'd written my MA thesis on, and uh and it just I I just saw on the first page that there were things that I just had no idea of um when I first wrote about it, um that were so fascinating. And I just went into the uh the reference library at Toronto and just tried to annotate the first five pages and discovery after discovery, and uh so I I ended up focusing the my whole thesis on on that book. And since then I've written that's come out as a book in a couple of editions, uh three Russian editions too, I think, um now. And um uh I also have a website on it, which is about two and a half thousand pages of my annotations, plus the uh plus the the text of the novel, plus hyperlinks to uh images and and so on. Yeah. So I've gone into it in a big way.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

Yeah.

Nabokov’s Life In Exile

SPEAKER_02 6:31

So uh who was Vladimir Nabokov?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Well, he was born in 1899, died in in in St. Petersburg, died in uh Montreux, Switzerland in 1977. He was the son of a very wealthy, very cultured family. Uh his father was a a statesman, had the great honor of being uh imprisoned by both the Tsar and by Lenin. And uh they left uh after the revolution uh in 1917, first to the Crimea, and then uh when the Reds came into the Crimea in uh under some machine gun uh hail, they they fled on a steamer to Greece and then to to London. Umbokov's father was a great Anglophile, and uh Nabokov went to Cambridge uh and did a degree there, and then his um his family had moved to Berlin just in his last semester in Cambridge. His father, who was his uh also the editor of the the great liberal newspaper of the Russian immigration in Berlin, which had 400,000 Russians uh in it, and about 200 200 publishing companies, because publishing was difficult in the U in the Soviet Union at that stage, so they were shipping books out to there. Um but because he was editor of this liberal newspaper and also had been the the leader of the um the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Russian Duma, um he was regarded and and was uh a member of the provisional government after uh af after the first um uh collapse of the Russian regime in 19 in February 1917. In fact, he wrote the uh uh the Tsar's abdication speech. Um he he was assassinated in in 1922 by some Russian far-right people, and uh then um Nbokov was already writing. He'd been he'd published his first book at 16 uh through his own mummy self-published, um, but he was also writing regularly in his father's newspaper under the pseudonym of Syrin to distinguish himself from his father's name because his father was on the mashed. Uh and uh he was already hailed as a as a major poet uh in his early 20s, but then switched to prose really most of the time in 1923, 24, and published his first novel in 25, and uh he was acclaimed as the star of the Russian emigration. Um and uh people said things like he he has saved the whole immigration. Um and then in uh he married a Russian Jewish woman, Vera, um, and they had a child in 34. They stayed in uh in Germany until 1937, uh when they moved to Paris, uh had a very meager existence there. Um but then in he was trying for ages to get out to the US and managed in 1940, just uh as the tanks were rolling through through uh northern France, and uh then st switched to well he had already uh he in fact you mentioned Laughter in the Dark, in w which he wrote in a way as a as a novel that could be easily adapted for the screen. It has all sorts of visual effects, blindness and and it it it involves the cinema usherette and so on. Um and uh in in 1936 he translated it into English and published it in the US. Uh so in so he was preparing for his his move, I think, even then. And then yeah, in 1914 he managed to get out uh uh uh another Russian writer, Mark Aldanov, uh had had a got an offer of a job at Stanford, but his English he felt his English wasn't good enough, so he passed the offer on to Nabokov. That enabled him to get out of um out of France and into the US. And then uh he worked in the 1940s as i in academia in at Stanford, at Wellesley College in in Boston, at Harvard, at Cornell. Um at the same time as he he was a passionate lepidopterist. He loved butterflies, he had collected them obsessively since uh he was seven and uh became, knew all the butterflies of the world by the time he was nine. He doesn't he was very precocious and uh uh published his first article uh in English in on butterflies in 1919 and and then published other articles uh in the next two decades and then became uh worked at the American Museum of Natural History in 1940-41, and became the curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology in in 1993, 1943, and uh and was kind working long hours in that in the 40s, and uh his work was well received at the time, but it wasn't really until the the late 1980s when people started working on the Latin American butterflies that he'd reorganized and realized how amazing his work was, that people realized his stature as a lepidopterist. Anyway, so he he was he was also writing for the New Yorker in the 40s and publishing his first novels and his wonderful autobiography, Speak Memory. Uh and uh then in 1949 he came back to an idea that he'd had in 1939 of uh uh writing a story uh about uh a child uh uh a uh a pedophile. Um uh uh he wrote that in in 1939 in Russian, uh, and his friends counseled him against publishing it. So he didn't. Uh but the idea kept on nagging at him, and then in 46 he began thinking about it again and and telling friends that he was going to be working on this. And in 1949, he sat down and wrote it after writing his autobiography, and and uh yeah, that took him well he he wrote it in uh under four years while he was preparing new me material to teach at at Cornell and and also writing his last um Lepidopterological works and beginning to translate what became a four-volume uh translation and commentary of Pushkin's Yugen and Yegin. So he he was working busy, busily. Uh and then and then uh in uh well as he was finishing Lolita, he wrote a very different kind of novel, Phnin, about rather than a uh a a grisly pervert about somebody who's put upon um by everybody because simply because he's Russian and doesn't speak English well in in America. Uh and then Pale Fire, he wrote oh well when Lolita came out, uh there was a great deal of hesitation about whether it could be published. All the this the story about that meant that it had lots of advanced publicity when it was eventually published in the US and in the UK, so it became a bestseller, and and Nabokov could retire from Cornell and and moved to Europe to be close to his sister and his son, who who was by then learning to training as an opera singer in uh Milan. Uh and he kept on writing wonderful books until he he died in uh Sendiceel.

Butterflies Chess And A Rare Mind

SPEAKER_01 14:59

So oh no, no, that's that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

I I didn't understand that. Well, what do you call the butterfly study of butterflies?

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Leperopterolterology. Lepidoptera is the scientific name for butterflies and moths. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

Yeah, I I I just thought this was a hobby for him. I didn't realize that he was quite leading in the field there.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, no, he he the the time he invested was pretty small, um, but like the the subsequent curator of Lepidopterology at of of of Lepidoptera at uh the Museum of Comparative Zoology, uh, a really brilliant scientist was organizing a an exhibition on Nabokov simply because of his name, and she didn't understand the depth of his work um un until she she got into it. And and then she she sent some some of her students, PhD students, to work on this hypothesis that Nabokov just tossed off about the sequence in which the um the blues, which were his specialty, uh were came from uh from Asia across the Bering Strait into the Americas. And he was he's just tossing off this hypothesis. But everything that he said in in a sentence or two turned out to be right. And they had no way of possibly figuring that out uh until about 2010. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Fascinating. That that is uh just a brilliant mind. I I mean there's so much I I want to ask you about. Even uh just just to go back on his brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

I mean, you know, well, one other thing that he was very interested in, I meant uh was chess. And he was a world-class chess composer. So he would relax after composing a novel, like composing a chess problem.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Yeah, no, no, just just I mean, that's that's uh I mean chess is a good way to uh the of the books that I've read, I haven't read all of them, but the books I have read, like chess is probably uh quite analogous to to his writing style because he's very unique,

Hidden Clues And Reader Discovery

SPEAKER_02 17:12

isn't he? To me, he's I think uh he's not he's not Kafka, but like uh again, I think there's that sort of um uh depth and and and strangeness and um the idea of hidden meaning and everything. Uh uh they're probably the closer ones in my mind. What what would you say to that?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Uh yeah, I I think uh well with with Kafka, there's there's always a sense that the meaning is elusive and will always remain so, and and you you're you're you're no wiser, you're more frustrated at the end. I mean, it's a brilliant kind of frustration, but uh with Nabokov, there are answers, so um uh the uh Nabokov deliberately makes things very engaging on the surface, but but he also has little connections between parts of the the story, and uh if you pay attention, if they catch your your curiosity, you you suddenly s see something else and it keeps on expanding and expanding. So I mean I think one of it one of the motivations for his writing the way he did was that he felt that um he he likes to to quote uh the glory of the glory of God is to hide things. This is an old quote, but the glory of God is to hide things and the glory of man is to find them, to discover them. And so he felt he felt that his excitement about working on butterflies and discovering new organs in butterflies and discovering he he just looked at their uh wing scale patterns in greater depth than had ever been looked at before. He he felt that he wanted to give that kind of excitement to his readers. Endless discovery. And yeah, that's certainly what's kept me hooked.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Yeah, I know it's incredible stuff. Um yeah, yeah, he's singular completely. Uh I don't think anyone's ever been like him or will ever be like him again. I mean, it's and and uh I know Lolita was adapted into a couple of films, but I was even saying to you on uh on the phone that it it's it's it's a book. You know, this is one of these examples where it can't be anything but that, you know. Like that I just don't think you can adapt something like this.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Um, yes, and and Stanley Kubrick, who did the first adaptation, uh said Lolita was the only film he wrestled never done because it was too good a book.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Yeah, yeah, no, no, uh a hundred percent.

Why Write Lolita At All

SPEAKER_02 19:47

So so let's so let's look at Lolita specifically now. So very controversial work. And I I guess I have to ask a question. What would have possessed a man at that you know starting in the 30s? He had the dummy run for what what's it called? The um The Enchanter's version of it. It's like The Enchanter. The Enchanter. Is that is that complete or was that like a more of a fragment?

SPEAKER_01 20:12

No, it was complete. It it was a novella, so about 70 pages. It was released as a as a novel by itself in in English, uh, but uh yeah, but it was uh a bit short as a novel. So uh Dmitry Nabok of the Sun wrote a long introduction. I I wrote I reviewed it for the listener and uh gave it suggested the title for the review, pre-hash. So it's kind of rehash made a hash of I mean it yeah, it doesn't strike me as being a very good book. It it's it seems to me uh overwritten. Um and I think partly because Nabokov was uncomfortable with the subject and and used his style, his Russian style was getting very ornate by this late stage in his career, and and the that is a kind of stylistic overcool. It's a bit like Proust um with the level of literary heartbean taken to an extreme. But uh yeah, and it it lacks oh well, it lacks all sorts of things that are in Lolita, but uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

So so so what do you think possessed him to write to write this at all? I mean, why did he think it I mean it would be amaz it amazes amazes me that he would have thought it could fly back then? Like his friends were probably advising him quite well.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Yeah, yeah. Well, um I I think the real reason that he wrote it was because he he believed very strongly in the in the innocence of children. And uh so he wanted to he always wanted to challenge himself. He had a very rosy disposition. Even though he's got a lot of uh murderers and and so on, as as even as narrators, um uh little ancestral characters. And um he he wanted to challenge himself always by looking at the reverse side of things to try and temper his his rosiness. And um so and he was also fascinated by love, so he he uh and the intensity of romantic love. So he offers this the story of a of uh in in uh the enchanter of a man who marries a woman for the sake of access to her daughter. Uh and uh well, yeah, um it it ends up with him being accidentally killed when he he try with the the wife dies, uh he he has the daughter in a in a hotel bedroom um and is is about to violate her for the first time. She she wakes up, freaks out, screams, and he rushes out outside and is killed by a passing truck. Um so it's uh it's a much thinner story than Lolita. Uh and and also in in The Enchanter, the uh it's a third-person novel. So we the the style in a way is supposed to echo the I don't know, the the complexity of of the character's mind. I'm not sure. Uh it's that that's part of the uh the failure of the book, I think that it doesn't quite justify the richness of of the style and the relative poverty, thinness of the imagination of the central character. Whereas in Lolita, uh what what makes it so difficult even now is that it's written by this this perpetrator, the Pedophile, uh who in the form of a confession, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Um after yeah, after uh he he has um he nearly tries he tries to well he he marries um the the mother again for access to the child. The mother is killed in a in an accident, and uh he manages to take Lolita from motel to motel uh for for two years before she escapes. Um and so this is his his confession, his excuse in a way for he uh for the murder that he commits of somebody who who abducts her um uh or free frees her if if you like from him, but who is also a Pedophile. Um Quilty. Quilty, yes. Whose name is is very carefully hidden from the reader for a long time, even after it uh from Humbert, the narrator, uh he doesn't know it. He he he's not even sure whether he's just being paranoid. This car follows them uh out into the American all the way through the American rest. Um and then when uh Lolita disappears, um, he tries to find out who this person was, and uh he manages to catch up with Lolita and who has left quilty by now and tries to find out her name. She does tell him eventually, and uh he withholds it from the reader for another 20 pages, uh and uh all the while saying that of course we we we know what this name was, and of course we don't. Um so yeah, it's one of the little paths of discovery. So it's a kind of uh one of the many things that Lolita does is it's a detective novel where the um the protagonist says on the first page that he's a murderer, and uh you've got to figure out who he murders. And it's not until very near the end of the book you find that out. And he he l lets you think for a while that he's gonna murder Lolita's mother, then Lolita herself, but no, it's the abductor.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

Uh liberator. Yeah. So so the um so so the history of uh of of publication, so what happens there?

How Lolita Reached Print

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Because this is once it comes out, yeah, uh it's very uh super controversial. One of the more controversial works of art probably to ever be released, I guess. Um I don't think that's something.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

And the uh the only one I think that is as at least as controversial now as it was when it was published. So if you think of somebody like something like uh Mara Movari, which was banned in 1857, or uh Ulysses, which was banned in in 22, uh they they seem perfectly uncontroversial now. Yeah. I think it's one one's about adultery, one one does have a lot of uh graphic sex and uh and obscenity. Well, but it has a lot of other things too. Um but Lolita, because it's it's the a story of paedophilia told from the point of view of the paedophile who is convinced that he is um his love for Lolita is something transcendent, um it it still gives people uh very uncomfortable feelings. I mean, you there's something rapturous about the prose. Yeah. And and yet you you you know that the rapture is is for uh a morally very, very disturbing end.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

So yeah. It's always uncomfortable. When when I talk to people about the book now and say, have you read it? Uh yeah, yeah, I I do get people going, Oh, I wouldn't read that, or like, you've read that. There's a judgment. But yeah, I mean, but this is a it's I mean, yeah, like it's incredible. It's just incredible. The rectorous prose you talk about, you're sort of getting pulled into his vision. It's it's quite intoxicating, and then you start sort of questioning yourself. It's a wonderful trick that gets played on you, I think. Um so yeah, I mean, I've gone back to it a few times because it's just such a such an experience. But um, so going back to the the publishing, so he writes this thing. I don't know w how he would have thought it would have got published in the day. I mean, that could be my naivete at uh or ignorance um at play there.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

But well, yeah, he was being published by the New Yorker, so his his his autobiography, Spec Memory, came out in chapters there, and he was getting rapturous responses. And he had a um a contract with the New Yorker that he had to give them a first reading right. So they they saw everything that he was writing and could say, yes, we want that, or or no, we don't. And he knew that the the New Yorker, which was much more prudish then than now, um was going to have problems with this. He also um was planning to publish it anonymously because he was at Cornell and he thought that uh there would be reverberations that Cornell It could be cancelled. So, yeah. Uh and he well, he did show it to Catherine White, his editor of The New Yorker, and she's she says it's great, but we can't touch it. And he had a lot of friends in the US publishing industry by then who were great, very keen to publish him. Uh, but one after the other, they they said no to Lolita in 1954. Uh and then uh in in desperation, he contacted his agent in France uh who submitted it to uh Maurice Girodius's Olympia Press, which uh published serious literature um but also material that was pornographic. And in fact, Gerodius loved mixing mixing the two. So he published uh Henry Miller, uh Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, um uh JP Dunleavy, and and and writers like that. But uh yeah, he he he also published Lolita in English in 1955, and then um yeah, um at the end of the year, Graham Green uh was asked to name his three favorite books of the year, and one of them was Lolita. And uh I mean I don't know how he I'll I'll show you. This is the um let's see this is what the it came out in two volumes. This is the Olympia Press edition. Um and uh then I a man called John Gordon, I think it was a um a book reviewer. Uh anyway, he he he wrote an indignant letter to the British press saying that this was the the filthiest book he'd ever read and and so on. And uh so Graham Green uh amusingly picked up on this and and set up a John Gordon society to ban uh pornography in or filth in in paintings, uh books, uh ceramics, you know, uh and uh and he's uh he was also going to release um a little uh book banner banned by the John Gordon Society. And of course, this got lots of publicity and uh and started uh inquiries from British and American publishers about how they could get hold of the book. Uh so um it was a very, very slow process. So um in what one of Nabokov's closest uh publishing friends was Joseph Epstein, who who later uh co-founded the New York Review of Books. And uh Epstein was working for Doubleday and he tr tried to create uh an atmosphere in which um Nebokov's uh in which Lolita would be taken um seriously. Oh, I should I should say that um uh uh Girolodias, when he was publishing uh the Olympia Press edition, insisted uh that Nabokov not publish it anonymously, that his name be on the cover. And Nabokov agreed to that. And uh others said, well, you know, Nabokov's style would have been recognizable to anybody anyway, but uh um so Epstein was trying to create an atmosphere in which Lolita could be published in America. Uh and there already already had been a couple of cases of the book being imported into the US and and being seized by customs, uh, and but then released. So that was a good sign. But Epstein published this periodical, uh irregular periodical, the Anchor Review, which published uh selections of of Lolita, about a third of the book, and uh critical commentary by uh Columbia professor and uh a few other things to give it some kind of academic clout. And and also uh got Nabokov to write uh what would become uh an afterward, an essay on Lolita that would become the afterward published with it thereafter. Um in the in the afterward, Nabokov writes uh uh f in a very, very high tone, uh as if you know a a book on this literary level doesn't even need to be considered uh, you know, the idea of censorship is just so absurd. I won't even discuss it. Uh interesting. Yeah. And then uh so it had so Lika had so many convolutions in its history. So it was it was published in in English in France, then uh because of the the scandal, Gallimard, the the leading French publisher, uh published it in in French, and it was also published in Excerpts in La Nouvelle Revue Française, which was their leading literary journal. Um and and then uh the the British government banned uh this was after the British and French had been colluding in the Suez War in 1956, they got the French government to ban Lolita uh in in being imported into or no, ban Lolita altogether. And then um the the French, of course, were were famous for the liberality on these matters in the 50s, so they're ahead of the rest of the world. But they because of that Suez complicity, they agreed. Uh and then um Girodius, knowing the literary standing of the book, uh uh got a campaign against um the the ban and and published this book called La Faire Lolita and and took a case against uh Gali Ma. And I was just looking at it for the first time in ages. This uh at the end, La Censure International, in international censorship with um letters from James Joyce to his publisher and letters from from Lawrence uh to his publishers about Lady Chatterley's lover. Uh so he he waged a successful campaign that got the the the ban lifted. So this was all before um it was published in the US, and then uh in the US it was published uh in 1958, and because of all the buildup of the the story, uh it it outsold every book since gone with the wind in the first few days and blew us you know the road.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Because it's had such a publicity campaign and court cases and international scandal for years.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Somebody wrote uh in a review it it shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight. And so, you know, the book's fortune was made.

SPEAKER_02 36:42

Yeah. So um, so who which countries so uh like some of the states did some of the because I know

Bans Backfires And The Streisand Effect

SPEAKER_02 36:50

Catcher in the Rye? That's another one that today we look at and think, Yes, oh well was that ever banned? Why was that ever banned? But then again, I mean it was in the back pocket of a few assassins and would be assassins, wasn't it? That that level. So I mean it's a strange one there. Um just the cynicism, I think. And how do you ban cynicism? It's pretty pretty tough. But but I think there were states that banned catcher on the rye, like like did Nabakoff fall foul of certain states in the US.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

Well, there were certain public libraries and and so on, you know, every time that sort of thing happened, of course, and spike and tails happened. Um yeah. So I I'm I'm uh I'm friends with uh Art Spiegelman, the uh author of Mouse, um, you know, the wonderful comic about his parents getting through Ausfritz where the the Jews are represented as mice and the Germans as cats. And uh it it sold very well in the uh when it first came out as a as a book. It got him the first Pulitzer Prize ever for comics, but it was banned about uh six years ago. Uh and so yeah, there's this enormous spike in his sales for the first time in a long time.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

It's amazing, isn't it? Like censorship is like uh uh I I made a digital film uh in 1999 or 2000. It was one of the one of the early films made on on video that we did here in New Zealand. And um we were going to be in the New Zealand Film Festival, and so we had to get uh rated. And we didn't know that. We were, you know, we're younger and didn't think about it. And it's like, okay, so it costs us a thousand dollars or something. We're waiting for it. And you know, the the the rating to come back, and we were like, oh man, you know, this is I wonder what they'll give it, you know. And we we were like, oh, well, you know, if it's too high, then maybe that'll limit it, limit the audience and everything. But then we were like, it came back, it was an R16, and we were like, hmm, if only it had been an R rating, didn't we do enough? I thought we were way more conjured, but it wasn't an RP16. So it was like, well, at least it's an R16, a pure R16. Like we we wanted the the the controversy of uh of a higher rating. Like it just, I don't know what it was. Like I just it just made us felt fair, you know, like we'd done something that other our peers hadn't done, really. I I think that was one of the distinctions we wanted that we went further than many of our peers would have gone.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Um I don't I think that's probably the motivation for Nabakhov, but um Well, some people suspected that it was, you know, that he wanted to make money um from Lolita. And in fact, I mean it was really uh a great risk because he it might not have got published at all. Uh and uh in fact the the book that he wrote to make money was was Pneen while he was so he was as he was finishing Lolita, he started writing Pneen, which which uh segments into chapters designed for the New Yorker, which paid very well. It was the best paying literary magazine in the world. And uh and the Panin stories were so geared to a New Yorker audience, so that was the one he was writing for money in order in case Lolita just couldn't get published. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:12

And and so, okay, so public libraries and and and there would have been states probably that that uh caused there would have been uproar and in different pockets about and and it was banned uh well then in in after the publication in uh the US the British wanted to publish it, and this censorship laws were fairly tight then.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

But there was a change to the censorship of laws that was coming in, and that again there was another campaign in uh in Britain uh to get as many distinguished writers as possible to disp to write on Lolita, and uh Nabokov was actually giving a lecture in Cambridge on Russian literature and censorship the two days before the publication of Lolita, and they had a big launch party uh on the 6th of November 1959, and the the censorship bill was was was under consideration, uh hadn't quite w was being discussed in Parliament, was about to be enacted. And uh at the launch party, uh somebody had gave them given them a tip-off that the gut the British government was not going to um challenge Lolita, so everybody was exuberant. Interesting. Yes. But but then it so it came out and it did very well in in England too, but um it was banned in uh South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand for a while.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

Oh, okay. So how long was it banned here?

SPEAKER_01 41:53

I don't know, about three, four years, I think. Uh yeah. I'm not I think uh in that time, uh so that was 59, so it was probably banned straight away then or when it became available in New Zealand, which was 1960. Uh the the law, uh the challenge to um the unexpurgated dish edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover happened in 1960, and uh so that case was lost by the prosecution, so Lady Chatterley's Lover could be allowed out, and once that happened, uh there's no reason to to ban Lolita anymore.

Film Versions And What They Miss

SPEAKER_01 42:33

But but there was a kind of censorship also in the the film version, so um you know Hollywood was pretty prudish in those days because of the Hayes Code, and uh Stanley Kubrick was was blown away by the novel and came to Nabokov in about 1958, I think, with the proposition to adapt it to the screen. But in order to make it accessible, uh acceptable, um he was going he was going to change the story so that Humbert marries Lilita at the end, as if that makes it all alright. He made an honest woman of her, yeah. Um and Nabokov, of course, said no to that. Uh, but then uh Kubrick kept Adam to try to write a screenplay, and Nabokov didn't want to, but then he suddenly I think he was out chasing butterflies and got an idea for how he could do it, and he wrote a screenplay for for Kubrick. Um Kubrick uh well he he cut down half of um Nabokov's screenplay, which was getting very exuberant, very uh surreal. Um said it uh Kubrick said it would take six hours to film. Um but he cast Sue Lyon as Lolita. She was 14 rather than 12, as Lolita is in the book, and she looked 17 and there's never any mention of the fact that she's you know much much younger than than she looks. She's so she looks like uh uh somebody in her last year of high school. Yeah. And uh and the the it's it's so coy about the sexuality of of the of the relationship. So that the the raunchiest thing that happens in the movie is the opening credits where Humbert is painting Lolita's toenails.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

That becomes the iconic scene from the film, doesn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

In in 19 in the late 90s, Adrian Mine, who had done Fatal Attraction, um got the rights to Lolita, and of course he wanted to do everything that was impossible for Kubrick back in the day. So he uh stressed the sexuality and he stressed Lolita's youth, so she she's in braces and blowing bubblegum when we first see her. So it's a it's a very, very different Lolita. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

It it it is. And and and you know, people I mean, uh you could argue the film sort of stands on its own merits, but it's not the book.

unknown 45:17

No.

SPEAKER_02 45:17

It just it just can't give you that insight into Humbert's mind, which to me is the whole point.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Um there is there is a woman director I I I understand who's is working on adapting the book, and I think from what I've read of of what she says, and she's done a lot of films about female sexuality, uh, she really understands what's what's at issue in the book, which is great. And the you know, there are I mean it it is something that that people think is is uh an invitation to paedophilia, but I have had correspondence with uh women who deal with sexual abuse in uh the Americas and in Europe who say that Lolita is just a brilliant, brilliant book for showing uh the whole complexity of of pedophilia, the you know, the the the self-delusion of the perpetrators and so on. Uh I recognize that in it.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

No, uh a hundred percent. Yeah. Um so uh look, I I'm a screenwriter. I'd love to get my hands on that Nopakov screenplay. Have you ever read it? Does it exist?

SPEAKER_01 46:30

Oh yes, it's published, it's published. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 46:33

So I could just find it online.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

Yeah, it's it's I mean it's it's published in a uh a kind of botched version, really. Nabokov had two versions, the the six-hour version and the Huriyah version. And he's uh because uh Kubrick asked him to go away and rewrite it, so he did and cut it down. Um, but when he when it came to publishing, he had this 11-book contract for Mick with McGraw Hill uh for a lot of money, and uh this was one of the things he needed to get ready in in time for the deadline for the 11 books, and he didn't take sufficient care so that it's a conflation of the two uh different uh screenplays, and so there are inconsistencies between it, and it's um yeah, it it it's not his best work on the on the uh and and and also the the um the the six-hour version it has been published in in German but not in English uh yet. Um that's got some very, very funny scenes. Um it i it's uh quite surreal in in la in a lot of ways, the uh the screenplay, and it shows how exuberant in the bock of his imagination was he's very very uh uh a stickler in when it came to translation. You had to translate uh uh word for or you know, l absolutely literally. And and he also wasn't quite as as much of a stickler as as Samuel Beckett in adapting his works, but uh he he was very uncomfortable about uh aspects of the Kubrick film that he saw, and uh like uh Peter Sills is wonderful ad libs that had nothing to do with uh the Lady original.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

So so what do you think the impact has been from this novel on censorship and publishing?

What Lolita Changed About Censorship

SPEAKER_02 48:34

Do you think there was a lasting impact or there were ripples that came from it that that affected other writers? Well did it embolden other writers, do you think? Or uh and did did it did it sort of liberalize publishing?

SPEAKER_01 48:51

Well, things were changing anyway, I think. Um so like Henry Miller wrote his very highly erotic fiction in the 30s, and they were that was being read uh in the Olympia press editions in in the US in the 50s. Things like Playboy started up in 53, um and uh you know Lady Chatterley's was allowed out. So um things were changing everywhere, and uh um just uh an interesting aspect. I I I I mentioned I started off uh when you asked about why Nabokov wrote Lilita and I said pardon it because of the very high value placed on the innocence of children. So one of the things he does in Lolita, he's got uh a forward to the book by an academic, a pompous academic. Yeah, yeah. Um I love that. Yeah, as as it's very, very funny when you when you read it with the right uh yeah, right expectations. But I think it was there in order to stop children picking up the book because it was over their heads. Interesting. In Arda, which was published in '69, so when when Nabokov's works were being uh by that time, Playboy had become the the best paying literary magazine in the world, and they were publishing Nabokov. Um, and and also you know sexuality was much more in the open in movies and and everywhere. And Arda is much, much more erotic than uh Lolita. It's it's a kind I as I keep on saying, it's a kind of uh literary version of the Garden of Bosch's the Garden of Earthly Delights. So it's got lots and lots of uh very vivid sex. Um, but again, he writes an opening chapter that is the most difficult thing he ever wrote in order to ensure that children didn't read on. Yeah. Built on self-censorship.

SPEAKER_02 50:54

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because it like it's uh I can draw a parallel to a script I'm actually working on now, which has children and violence in it. And the director wanting some sort of framing device just to create a little bit of distance and and given out in a way. And I guess by that pompous academic saying at the at the beginning, we're dealing with a criminal here. This isn't your you know, your your average person. He is doing that too. There is a little bit of like, you know, you can point to that that that introduction and and and say, well, you know, there is an early condemnation of what's going on, you know. Um I think even for for adult readers, you know. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Yes, yes, yes. And um you you were asking about the repercussions of Lolita's publication uh on censorship. Well, I know I I said I I think things were liberalizing generally, but then because of the uh the concern about uh pedophilia and and even the the hysteria in the late 80s and 90s, uh um it be people began to to think that Lolita was uh uh you know, like like those friends of yours who who thought you were a bit suspect for even having for having read it. Yeah. Um people just didn't want to go near it, didn't didn't understand that it wasn't at at all um advocating paedophilia, that it was a uh a really strong case against it. Um but yeah, so people who know nothing about it have have backed off Lolita in a in a in a way. Almost anything else can get published these days, but but something like that. So yes, it's it's curious that something like uh uh again the Art Spiegelman's mouse comes up. Well, of course, this the the censorship from the right in the US these days uh is a different thing, and that's what what caught uh Spiegelman. Uh it's you know, it's a wonder somebody hasn't made a campaign against Lilita from the American right.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

Well, yeah, I'd say there would be people that would if it was brought to their attention, they might try to make some hay out of it. Yeah. No, that that that's fascinating. I mean, the lesson here to me is that censorship often amplifies a product or or or a message, doesn't it? It's like you try to suppress and and it it's it becomes a PR campaign, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 53:38

As as Bertrand Russell said uh at some point, uh, you know, if you ban trains, people would give a perverse interest in trains.

SPEAKER_02 53:46

They've would, you know, but but but the the impulse to census remains. It's like no lessons are ever learned from this. I mean, the way to deal with material like that you don't like would be to just forget about it. And yeah, it's a the streis and effect thing, you know, just to just ignore it and and it may go away. It could have been just a little underground um novel, even though I don't think it would have been because of the brilliance of the writing. Um, I don't think that's realistic at all, but uh but that seems to be the lesson with all of this. Yeah.

Banned Books Lessons For Today

SPEAKER_02 54:16

I think I'd like to start a free speech union book club, really. And that would be a good idea. Because there were so many books like this. Lady Chatterley's Lover, I'd love to get into um the court cases there, you know, the court case there and everything. But Catcher in the Rye is another one I come back to because it's very it's what I find fascinating about that book is that when we were dealing with the hate speech laws, people would try to assure us by saying, well, the the um uh the level will be it'll be the threshold will be so high that that most people won't even be affected by it. But that assumes that the most provocative statement is the most harmful statement. And we can't we can't always guarantee that, you know. And I think Catcher in the Rye is a good example of that. It's like it's not on its face is uh anywhere near as controversial as um Lolita, but it's about a cynical young man. And and that seems to have been enough to really set some young readers off. But what I mean today what law would ever hoover that up?

SPEAKER_01 55:35

Well, uh wh why don't you why don't you re-establish the John Gordon Society?

SPEAKER_02 55:43

We need something like that. Yeah, but I mean well, uh because these lessons from literature and art really can be applied across the board, I think. Um uh I the the whole idea of the strip the Streisand effect and all that stuff. But yeah, no.

SPEAKER_01 56:01

Um just just just as you were you were talking, I was I was thinking about um oh old older Prudish standards look so absurd in in retrospect. So when uh Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was being translated into English in the 1870s or eighties, um there's a chapter ending where um Anna is pregnant. It's it's the end of the the last sentence in the chapter. And in English, they didn't dare translate the word pregnant, so they left it in Russian, Getamina.

SPEAKER_02 56:43

So this is a typo. Yeah. Oh well, Brian, I think we've yeah, that this has been a fantastic discussion on this great book, this masterpiece. I I would say to supporters, test yourselves. Yes, push yourselves and read it because you will be rewarded. Like he is a masterful writer. I mean, I got so many questions just about Nabokov as a writer I could I could throw at you, but uh that then it becomes a literary podcast. Maybe maybe I should moonlight and do another one. But uh anyway. No, but thank you once again for for giving us this time and uh taking us through a fascinating history of censorship.

Final Thoughts And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_00 57:26

Thank you for listening to Free to Speak. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider sharing the podcast with others. We release new episodes regularly, and subscribing is the easiest way to stay up to date. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, you can contact us at podcast at fsu.nz. If you want to find out more about the New Zealand Free Speech Union, visit fsu.nz.