For James Twigg:
In the last sentence of your first paragraph, do you mean censored,
censured, or both? Otherwise, you are, of course, quite correct.
Eric Hyman
Professor of English
Graduate Coordinator
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Rd.
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1901
ehyman@uncfsu.edu
From: Vladimir Nabokov
Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of James Twiggs
Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 3:54 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov & Playboy ...
In a message
dated 09/06/2010 03:08:28 GMT Daylight
Time, spklein52@HOTMAIL.COMwrites [quoting
-- A. S.]:
Playboy often bills itself as America’s most intelligent smut magazine and Nabokov was certainly one of America’s most intelligent smut authors.
Did not
Nabokov invite just this description by his bizarre collusion with Playboy? If
"Lolita" is a truly moral work, what was he playing at? To
Nabokovians it may betoken some kind of amused sophisticion, but does it
not demonstrate a moral confusion?
Anthony
Stadlen
======
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
All
private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
co-editors.