Look at the Harlequins!

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,, 1974. Inscribed by the fastidious author to an excessively bold editor First edition, first printing, presentation copy inscribed by the author on the half-title, and scarce thus, "For Gordon Lish, with best regards from Vladimir Nabokov, who has corrected several misprints in this copy, 6.ix.74 Montreaux". Lish had been offered the serial rights to the title by the editor, Fred Hills, but his infamously heavy editing caused Nabokov to reject the proposal. Nabokov has made corrections to pages 8, 10, 90, 116, 231, and 246, crossing out two whole sentences on p. 116, and changing "confined" to "confirmed" on p. 8, line 31, a correction made in the second printing. This was Nabokov's final book, inscribed in his final home, Montreaux, where he lived from 1961 until his death in 1977. Gordon Lish (b.1934) is an American writer and literary editor, who was fiction editor at Esquire from 1969-77. While at Esquire he published several of Nabokov's stories and edited the collections The Secret Life of Our Times and All Our Secrets Are the Same, which featured Nabokov's work. Nabokov's last editor, Fred Hills, had offered the serial rights of Look at the Harlequins! to Lish in 1974. "Nobody truly edited Nabokov... [he] reviewed every sentence, every comma, every semicolon" (quoted in Sklenicka, p. 283). Hills personally delivered the gallery proofs to Nabokov who, upon seeing the edits, asked "Who is this fellow Gordon Lish and what is he doing?" (ibid., p. 284). Lish had "very cleverly pieced together parts of the page proof to create an excerpt that read as if it were a very liberal account of Nabokov's personal life with his wife, Véra. When I met with Nabokov, he held up the offending proof page at arm's length, as if it were some kind of foul-smelling fish. He was appalled by Lish's heavy-handed and inaccurate treatment, and said that this simply 'won't do' - and that was the end of the excerpt! It was never published" (Hills quoted in Nabokov Online Journal). Nabokov's notoriously keen eye for errors in the publication of his own work had evidently put him at odds with Esquire on previous occasions: in October of 1972, he had written to Lish regarding Esquire's intention to reprint his short story The Potato Elf. He writes that he had recently retranslated the story, and notes that the previous version published in Esquire, in December of 1939, "is, alas, abominable, with innumerable errors, such as howlers, illiteracies, omissions, and so forth. It cannot be corrected, and must not be reprinted... If you want the new, and lovely, Potato Elf, untouched by the Death's Head Moth of mistranslation, I would be delighted to have you publish it" (Letters, p. 503). Octavo. Original black cloth, spine and rear cover lettered in metallic red, front lettered in blind, red endpapers. With dust jacket, Juliar's variant A. Housed in red cloth chemise and custom red quarter morocco solander box. Head of spine lightly bumped, spine ends a touch rubbed, still a fine copy in near-fine jacket, spine panel a little toned, ends very slightly rubbed and creased, single nick to centre of spine panel, very bright and fresh. Juliar A46.1. "Interview with Fred Hills, Vladimir Nabokov's Last Editor", Nabakov Journal Online, Vol. XIII, 2019, available online; Dmitri Nabokov & Matthew J. Bruccoli, Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, 1989. Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver, A Writer's Life, 2009.