Sixty years ago today, on November 26, 1958, Vladimir and Vera
Nabokov went out to dinner at Cafe Chambord on Third Avenue at
49th Street. The other dinner guests included Walter Minton, publisher
of G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, and his wife, Polly, as well as Victor
Schaller, Putnam’s head of finance, and his wife. The mood should have
been celebratory in light of Lolita’s increasing success. The
novel, published three months earlier, was atop bestseller lists,
received reviews—rapturous or critical—from all corners, and
foreshadowed the book’s permanent place as a controversial topic of
conversation.
The mood, however, was anything but celebratory. As Vera later wrote in great detail in a diary chronicling Lolita’s path to and during publication, a melancholy air suffused the evening because the Mintons were unduly preoccupied with a Time Magazine article published the previous week.
The article, unbylined but written by staff writer and future Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber, was ostensibly about the public reception of Lolita.
Haber opened with an account of Nabokov at a Putnam’s-sponsored
reception for the novel, where he, according to Haber, “faced a
formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women.” After quickly
dispensing with the positive and negative critical reception for Lolita, Haber
let loose on an altogether different target: Rosemary Ridgewell, a
Latin Quarter showgirl who had, much to her surprise and the public’s,
helped bring about Lolita‘s publication in America after years of stops and starts. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-showgirl-who-discovered-lolita/
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