Subject
Norman Mailer & LOLITA
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Engaged in the endless and hopeless task of catching up on
my stack of weekly _Times Literary Supplement_s, I encountered the
following curiostity in the issue of 25 Sept. 1998, p. 16
Mailer recently published a retrospective collection of his work entitled
_The Time of His Time_, accompanied by fresh notes. In his note prefacing
his story "The Time of Her Time," he reports that:
"...in 1959 his editor at Putnam's, Walter Minton, pleaded with him to
drop the short story "The Time of her Time" from _Advertisements for
Myself_. There was too much sex and swearing in it, he protested. Mailer
insisted on keeping the story in, however, and 'a year or two later Minton
published LOLITA.' It was doing Mailer's story, he confided to the author
afterwards, 'and seeing how little trouble came to us, which made me
realize you could do LOLITA.' The septagenarian bruiser fairly beams with
pride at this recollection. 'Reader, the story you are about to peruse is
the godfather of LOLITA.'"
The TLS columnist tartly remarks: "We could almost join in the
excess of sentiment, were it not for the fact that LOLITA was published
in the US in 1958, a year before _Advertisements for Myself_ and in France
hree years before that."
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
my stack of weekly _Times Literary Supplement_s, I encountered the
following curiostity in the issue of 25 Sept. 1998, p. 16
Mailer recently published a retrospective collection of his work entitled
_The Time of His Time_, accompanied by fresh notes. In his note prefacing
his story "The Time of Her Time," he reports that:
"...in 1959 his editor at Putnam's, Walter Minton, pleaded with him to
drop the short story "The Time of her Time" from _Advertisements for
Myself_. There was too much sex and swearing in it, he protested. Mailer
insisted on keeping the story in, however, and 'a year or two later Minton
published LOLITA.' It was doing Mailer's story, he confided to the author
afterwards, 'and seeing how little trouble came to us, which made me
realize you could do LOLITA.' The septagenarian bruiser fairly beams with
pride at this recollection. 'Reader, the story you are about to peruse is
the godfather of LOLITA.'"
The TLS columnist tartly remarks: "We could almost join in the
excess of sentiment, were it not for the fact that LOLITA was published
in the US in 1958, a year before _Advertisements for Myself_ and in France
hree years before that."
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618