After the phone call came through, the publisher climbed on to the table. An anonymous friend inside the Home Office had rung with the news: the government had decided against prosecution. No one responsible for the novel to be published the next day would go to jail. The three hundred guests invited to the Ritz were jubilant.
For a month, a copy of the scandalous work had been under examination by the Director of Public Prosecutions; twenty thousand copies were waiting in bookshops, to be either sold out or quietly pulped. The charge hanging over the publisher was dissemination of an immoral work. In the House of Commons, the Attorney-General had warned Nigel Nicolson that publication of it could land him behind bars. The author’s wife joked that her husband would spend Christmas either in Italy or at the Old Bailey.
The party held in London on 5 November 1959 was a climactic moment in the career of a novel that would turn the life of its author upside-down. Five American houses had rejected the manuscript, and urgently advised him against publication. The French publisher who eventually accepted the book specialized in erotica, trading in titles like Tender Thighs and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Graham Greene, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955, was the first to notify the world that the two green volumes released by Olympia Press were great literature. On that November evening four years later, even the British government certified that the book in question was not pornography, but art. Thereafter the triumphal march of the novel was not to be halted. The cheers that went up when Nigel Nicolson clambered on to the table and announced the news could be heard blocks away.1
This part of the story is well-known. The following, unknown part has elements of the fantastic about it – indeed, may sound like a tall tale. Yet no overinventive author but rather life itself is responsible for its volutes and arabesques. It is a true story, and we will begin with its end.
Eight years before the big party in London, the local paper in Lübeck announced that one of its contributors had passed away:
Last Wednesday, after a short illness, our colleague and collaborator Heinz von Eschwege-Lichberg died. The pen has finally fallen from the hands of one of the best-known personalities in German journalism.2
The condolences of the editorialist were only slightly overstated at the time. Today the fame of the deceased has faded, to put it mildly: until recently, Herr von Eschwege was completely forgotten. He is not to be found in any directory of writers, there is scarcely a trace of him in any literary archive, and the only work of biographical reference that mentions him shortens his life by twenty years.3 That is forgivable, because a kind of twilight hovers around his very name. As a writer he called himself Heinz von Lichberg.4 He was born, however, Heinz von Eschwege. His family background, an ancient line of Hessian aristocrats, was more military than literary. Although his father was a colonel in the infantry,5 the son took to poetry early on. As a youth Heinz von Lichberg was already placing poems in Jugend and Simplicissimus. In the middle of the First World War, while serving as a lieutenant in the Naval Artillery reserve, he published a collection of fifteen tales, under the title The Accursed Gioconda, which appeared in 1916 under the imprint of Falken-Verlag in Darmstadt. Other short books followed.6 After the war, however, Lichberg mainly devoted himself to journalism, working in Berlin for the newspapers of Scherl-Verlag, the nucleus of the later Hugenberg empire. He became popular in 1929, when he flew as a reporter for Scherl-Verlag on the transatlantic voyage of the Graf Zeppelin; his account of this journey, still obtainable in second-hand bookshops today, was successfully marketed to a proud nation under the title Zeppelin Goes Round the World. On this trip Heinz von Lichberg saw New York – over a decade before Vladimir Nabokov.
Tradition has it that the latter came within an inch of committing a historic folly. In the afterword to the novel that made him world-famous and financially independent, Nabokov writes that he was often tempted to destroy the work in gestation:
Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.7
Juanita Dark was the name Nabokov had then assigned his young heroine. What would have happened if Véra had not restrained her husband from destroying the dangerous bundle of papers? Nabokov would have died a professor of literature and a ‘writer’s writer’. Google would not spit out millions of entries under a single term. Lolita, Texas, would not have considered applying to change its name. Lolita would not have risen from name to concept.8 The literature of the twentieth century would have lost one of its most audacious works. And yet there would have been a printed Lolita in the world.9