It isn’t clear if Nabokov followed the news after Grammer’s arrest. The trial showcased further lurid details, and Grammer’s execution by hanging in 1954 became an added spectacle because it was initially botched. But the main affair—husband murders wife, passes it off as car accident—was enough inspiration for him. The Grammer case clearly echoed the untimely death of Charlotte Haze, struck by a car after running away from the argument with Humbert where she learns of his true designs on her daughter.
The final line of the Grammer paragraph in Lolita reads with further chilling force. Grammer could not conceal his crime from the world after all. Humbert Humbert, systematically raping Dolores Haze for nearly two years on a cross-country odyssey, could, and did. No wonder he concluded: “I did better.”
I bring up the Grammer case because it is another concrete example of Vladimir Nabokov drawing upon real-life crimes to help him with his novel. As with Sally Horner’s kidnapping, the note card’s survival indicates that Nabokov attached enough importance to the case that he wished people to know he did at some future point.
But the case also demonstrates Nabokov’s extended interest in crime stories. This, too, he sought to deny in public; he was also openly critical of mystery novels despite his boyhood love of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, and he called out Dostoevsky as a hack, though he taught Crime and Punishment to his Cornell students. He disdained those who would reduce Lolita to genre, yet a great deal of Nabokov’s fiction relies on the tropes of crime and suspense: Invitation to a Beheading centers around a man waiting to be executed; Despair hinges upon a man ready to murder his double; and Lolita, of course, is about kidnapping and rape, and culminates in murder.
Which is also why Nabokov’s interest, just over a month after Lolita’s American publication, in a third crime jumped out at me. As Véra told their close friend Morris Bishop when he telephoned with congratulations on the novel’s success, in the week of September 12, 1958, Vladimir had become obsessed with reading up on the stabbing murders of Dr. Melvin Nimer and his wife, Louise Jean, in their Staten Island home. What fascinated Nabokov was that police initially treated their eight-year-old son, Melvin Jr., as a suspect. Even though strips of cloth found on the boy’s bed suggested he had been restrained while his parents were murdered, Melvin’s “unnaturally calm demeanor” raised red flags in investigators’ minds, as did an apparent confession elicited during a mental health evaluation, and the lack of forced entry into the Nimer home.
But the presumed case against the little boy soon fell apart. No physical evidence linked Melvin to his parents’ murders. And police learned that Dr. Nimer had left a set of spare keys at the hospital where he worked, which had vanished—thus answering the “lack of forced entry” question. The case remains unsolved to this day, but there were police detectives still claiming as recently as 2007 that Melvin Nimer was the best suspect in the case.
THE NABOKOVS WOULD VENTURE WEST one more time before Vladimir finished the Lolita manuscript. After so many years of work—five or six, depending on who was counting and who was listening—Lolita was nearly done, despite not being anywhere close to publication. This road trip also proved to be the longest Vladimir and Véra stayed away from the East Coast.
They left Ithaca in that still-reliable Oldsmobile in early April 1953. From there they headed toward Birmingham, Alabama, a pit stop en route to the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, where butterflies were supposed to be plentiful. What Nabokov discovered upon arrival in May was that the weather was too cold, the wind gusts too strong, for decent butterfly-catching. By the end of the month he and Véra had moved farther west, passing by several California lakes and ending up in Ashland, Oregon.
There the couple stayed from the first of June through the end of August, living at 163 Mead Street. When there were no butterflies to catalog, Nabokov was on a mad sprint to finish Lolita, burning his handwritten pages as soon as Véra typed them up. When their Oregon summer idyll ended, the Nabokovs wended their way back east via Jenny Lake and the Grand Tetons.
Once more, they were back in Ithaca at the start of September, and this time, the end of Lolita was in sight.
Twenty-Six
Writing and Publishing Lolita
On December 6, 1953, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a note in his diary, at the bottom of a page largely filled with numerical grades for the final assignment of his literature class. “Finished Lolita which was begun exactly 5 years ago.” It was a finish line he’d spent many of those years never expecting to reach.
There were classes to teach at Cornell to pay the bills and to fund his summer trips to hunt butterflies. Other projects had also interrupted Nabokov’s progress on Lolita, from translation work (The Song of Igor’s Campaign) to the first version of his autobiography, which was published in 1951. Lolita ought to have been “a novel I would be able to finish in a year if I could completely concentrate upon it.” Instead it emerged piecemeal, with him writing on index cards in the passenger seat of a car or lying in bed at night.
Nabokov had spent the summer of 1953 trip writing steadily, almost maniacally, dictating his prose to Véra, then “crumpling each old manuscript sheet once it had served its turn and discarding the pages out the car window or into a hotel fireplace.” Nabokov put in sixteen-hour writing days over the course of the fall of 1953—on Cornell’s dime—delegating the teaching and exam-marking to Véra.
He grew anxious about the manuscript as the pages piled up. In a September 29, 1953, letter to Katharine White at the New Yorker, Nabokov called the book an “enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel that, after five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors, I have more or less completed.” He was certain the New Yorker wouldn’t want to publish an excerpt, but the magazine had a first-look agreement on anything Nabokov wrote, and he always listened to White’s feedback, whatever the outcome. She liked it, but confirmed Nabokov’s suspicions that the magazine wasn’t the right home for an excerpt.
Now, the book was finished. An odyssey that did not, in fact, begin on December 6, 1948, but at least a decade earlier, as Volshebnik, or in 1947, when Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: “I am writing… a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea.” Nabokov knew he was writing a novel that could cause outrage and controversy. No wonder he attempted to destroy the manuscript at least twice that we know of.
The first time was in the fall of 1948. As Stacy Schiff recounted in her biography of Véra, Nabokov carried his manuscript to the trash cans behind his house on Seneca Street in Ithaca. When Véra realized what Vladimir was set upon doing, she raced out to stop him. Just before she got there, one of Nabokov’s students at Cornell, Dick Keegan, chanced upon the scene. He saw Nabokov beginning to feed his manuscript sheets into a fire set near the trash cans. “Appalled, [Véra] fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. ‘Get away from there!’ Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. ‘We are keeping this,’ she announced.”