1958 Five years after it was written, three after its first appearance in Paris under the imprint of the Olympia Press and the subsequent seizure by British customs of all copies entering the UK, Lolita finally emerged in the United States, to become an almost instant bestseller. Usually we chronicle such past repressions implying that we are all much more enlightened and liberal now, but would the 21st century greet any more warmly a novel about a middle-aged man falling in love with, then kidnapping, a twelve-year-old girl? Not likely.
Of the two films made of the book – Stanley Kubrick’s in 1962 and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997 – the former was the better, thanks to the script (to which Nabokov contributed) and the outstanding acting of James Mason and Shelley Winters as Humbert and Charlotte, and the ingenious improvisations of Peter Sellers as Quilty. But good as it was, the movie could only reproduce surface dialogue, whereas the heart of the prose narrative is the complex working of Humbert Humbert’s consciousness as he advances then retreats, rhapsodises most subjectively over his nymphet then stands apart in objective blame of his behaviour, only to exonerate himself by appeal to irresistible passion.
The dialectics of Humbert’s inner monologue open thematic debates too. Who does the seducing – the innocent American or the wily European (perhaps representing America and Europe generally)? ‘Frigid gentlewomen of the Jury! … I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me’, claims Humbert. Tactically, maybe, but only within Humbert’s elaborate, long-planned strategy.
Again, who is the more trapped – Lolita as she is moved around from Kumfy Kabins to Sunset Motels to U-Beam Cottages (‘Children welcome, pets allowed’), always watched over by Humbert until sprung by Quilty? Or Humbert by his obsession? It is Humbert who winds up in prison, literally; but Lolita, who escapes, is betrayed by Quilty, only to be trapped again as the heavily pregnant ‘Mrs Richard F. Schiller’, stuck in a ramshackle cabin, unable to pay her debts or get to Alaska, where her husband has the promise of a good job. But this time it’s Humbert who springs her, with the gift of four thousand dollars, out of hopeless love.
Then he sets off for his vengeful rendezvous with Clare Quilty.