part0008

Sometime at the end of July 1959 (my pocket diary does not give the exact date), in Arizona, where my wife and I were hunting butterflies, with headquarters at Forest Houses (between Flagstaff and Sedona), I received through Irving Lazar who was representing me a message from Messrs. Harris & Kubrick. They had acquired the film rights of Lolita in 1958, and were now asking me to come over to Hollywood and write the script. The honorarium they offered was considerable, but the idea of tampering with my own novel caused me only revulsion. A certain lull in the activity of the local lepidoptera suggested, however, that we might just as well drive on to the West Coast. After a meeting in Beverly Hills (at which I was told that in order to appease the censor a later scene should contain some pudic hint to the effect that Humbert had been secretly married to Lolita all along), followed by a week of sterile meditation on the shores of Lake Tahoe (where a calamitous growth of manzanita precluded the presence of good butterflies), I decided not to undertake the job and left for Europe.

We sojourned in Paris, London, Rome, Taormina, Genoa, and Lugano, where we arrived for a week’s stay on December 9 (Grand Hotel, rooms 317–318, says my 1959 agenda, which now grows more talkative). I had long ceased to bother about the film, when suddenly I experienced a small nocturnal illumination, of diabolical origin, perhaps, but unusually compelling in sheer bright force, and clearly perceived an attractive line of approach to a screen version of Lolita . I regretted having had to decline the offer and was aimlessly revolving bits of dream dialogue in my mind when magically a telegram came from Hollywood urging me to revise my earlier decision and promising me a freer hand.

We spent the rest of the winter in Milan, San-Remo, and Mentone and on Thursday, February 18, 1960, left for Paris (2 singles Mentone-Paris, beds 6 and 8, car 9, leaving 7:15 P.M. , arriving 8:55 A.M. , these and other informative items from my diary are mentioned not only for mnemonic comfort but because I have not the heart to leave them ignored and unused). The first lap of the long journey to Los Angeles began with a rather ominous gag: the damned sleeping car stopped before reaching the platform, amid the mimosas and cypresses in the aquarelle elegance of a Riviera evening, and my wife and I, and the almost demented porter, had to swarm up from ground level to board the train.

By next evening we were at Le Havre, on the United States . We had booked an upper-deck cabin (61) but were transferred at no extra cost, with a bonus of fruit and whiskey, to a charming suite (65) by courtesy of the charming management—one of the many treats an American writer is granted. On Saturday, February 27, after four busy days in New York, we left for Chicago (10 P.M. , car 551, bedrooms en suite E–F, enjoyable jottings, naive trivia of yore!) and next evening boarded the Super Chief on which the next installment of our bedrooms welcomed us with a twin burst of music, whereupon we scrambled frantically to stop, kill, stamp out, annihilate the heinous gadget and, not finding the switch, had to call for help (of course, the situation is incomparably worse on Soviet trains where you are strictly forbidden to turn off the muzakovitch).

On March 1, Kubrick and I, at his Universal City studio, debated in an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion how to cinemize the novel. He accepted all my vital points, I accepted some of his less significant ones. Next morning, sitting on a bench under a lovely bright yellow-green Pyrospodia tree in a public park not far from the Beverly Hills Hotel (one of whose cottages Mr. Lazar had taken for us) I was already attending with all my wits to the speech and pantomime in my head. On March 9, Kubrick had us meet Tuesday Weld (a graceful ingénue but not my idea of Lolita). On March 10 we rented, from the late John Francis Fay, a pleasant villa (2088 Mandeville Canyon Road). On March 11, Kubrick sent me by messenger a rough outline of the scenes he and I had agreed upon: they covered Part One of the novel. By then his attitude had convinced me that he was willing to heed my whims more closely than those of the censor.

During the next months we met rather seldom—every fortnight or so, at his place or mine; outlines ceased altogether, criticism and advice got briefer and briefer, and by midsummer I did not feel quite sure whether Kubrick was serenely accepting whatever I did or silently rejecting everything.

I worked with zest, composing mentally every morning from eight to noon while butterfly hunting in the hot hills, which, except for some remarkably skittish individuals of a little-known Wood Nymph, produced nothing noteworthy, but per contra teemed with rattlers whose hysterical performance in the undergrowth or in the middle of the trail was more comical than alarming. After a leisurely lunch, prepared by the German cook who came with the house, I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning.

By nature I am no dramatist; I am not even a hack scenarist; but if I had given as much of myself to the stage or the screen as I have to the kind of writing which serves a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book, I would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the bit part of guest, or ghost, prompting them, and, in a word, pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual—for there is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity. All I could do in the present case was to grant words primacy over action, thus limiting as much as possible the intrusion of management and cast I persevered in the task until I could tolerate the rhythm of the dialogue and properly control the flow of the film from motel to motel, mirage to mirage, nightmare to nightmare. Long before, in Lugano, I had adumbrated the sequence at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, but its exact mechanism now proved tremendously difficult to adjust so as to render by the transparent interplay of sound effects and trick shots both a humdrum morning and a crucial moment in the lives of a desperate pervert and a wretched child. A small number of scenes (for example, McCoo’s phantom house, the three poolside nymphs, or Diana Fowler starting to repeat the fatal cycle through which Charlotte Haze had passed) are based on unused material that I had kept after destroying the MS. of my novel, an act which I regret less than my having discarded those passages.

By the end of June, after having used up over a thousand cards, I had the thing typed, sent to Kubrick the four hundred pages it made, and, needing a rest, was driven by my wife in a rented Impala to Inyo County for a short stay at Glacier Lodge on Big Pine Creek, where we collected the Inyo Blue and other nice bugs in the surrounding mountains. Upon our returning to Mandeville Canyon, Kubrick visited us to say that my screenplay was much too unwieldly, contained too many unnecessary episodes, and would take about seven hours to run. He wanted several deletions and other changes, and some of these I did make, besides devising new sequences and situations, when preparing a shorter script which he got in September and said was fine. That last stretch was the toughest, but also the most exhilarating part of the six-month task. Ten years later, though, I reread my play and restored a few scenes.

My final meeting with Kubrick must have taken place on September 25, 1960, at his house in Beverly Hills: he showed me that day photographs of Sue Lyon, a demure nymphet of fourteen or so, who, said Kubrick, could be easily made to look younger and grubbier for the part of Lolita for which he already had signed her up. On the whole I felt rather pleased with the way things had worked out, when on October 12, at P.M. , my wife and I took the Super Chief (bdr. E + F, car 181) for Chicago, changing there to the Twentieth-Century (bdr J-K, car 261) and reaching New York, at 8:30 A.M. on October 15. In the course of that splendid journey—and the following note can stir only the dedicated extra-sensorialist—I had a dream (October 13) in which I saw written: “They say on the radio that she is as natural as Sarah Footer.” I have never known anybody of that name.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. Mine was to endure for a year and a half. As early as October 28 (New York, Hampshire House, room 503) I find the following plan penciled in my little book: “a novel, a life, a love—which is only the elaborate commentary to a gradually evolved short poem.” The “short poem” started to become a rather long one soon after the Queen Elizabeth (“Buy dental floss, new pince-nez, Bonamine, check with baggage-master big black trunk on pier before embarcation, Deck A, Cabin 71”) deposited us at Cherbourg on November 7. Four days later, at the Principe e Savoia in Milan and then throughout the winter in Nice, in a rented flat (57 Promenade des Anglais) and after that in Tessin, Valais, and Vaud (“Oct. 1, 1961, moved to Montreux-Palace”) I was absorbed in Pale Fire, which I finished on December 4, 1961. Lepidopterology, work on the galleys of my Eugene Onegin mammoth, and the revising of a difficult translation (The Gift ) took care of the spring of 1962, spent mostly in Montreux, so that (apart from the fact that nobody insisted on my coming to Elstree) the shooting of the Lolita film in England was begun and concluded far beyond the veil of my vanities.

On May 31, 1962 (almost exactly twenty-two years after we emigrated from St.-Nazaire aboard the Champlain ), the Queen Elizabeth took us to New York for the opening of Lolita . Our cabin (main deck, cabin 95) was quite as comfortable as the one we had on the Champlain in 1940 and, moreover, at a cocktail party given by the purser (or surgeon, my scribble is illegible), he turned to me and said: Now you, as an American businessman, will enjoy the following story (story not recorded). On June 6 I revisited my old haunts, the entomological department at the American Museum of Natural History, where I deposited the specimens of Chapman’s Hairstreak I had taken the previous April between Nice and Grasse, under strawberry trees. The première took place on June 13 (Loew’s State, BW at 45, E2 + 4 orchestra, “horrible seats” says my outspoken agenda). Crowds were awaiting the limousines that drew up one by one, and there I, too, rode, as eager and innocent as the fans who peered into my car hoping to glimpse James Mason but finding only the placid profile of a stand-in for Hitchcock. A few days before, at a private screening, I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used. The modifications, the garbling of my best little finds, the omission of entire scenes, the addition of new ones, and all sorts of other changes may not have been sufficient to erase my name from the credit titles but they certainly made the picture as unfaithful to the original script as an American poet’s translation from Rimbaud or Pasternak.

I hasten to add that my present comments should definitely not be construed as reflecting any belated grudge, any high-pitched deprecation of Kubrick’s creative approach. When adapting Lolita to the speaking screen he saw my novel in one way, I saw it in another—that’s all, nor can one deny that infinite fidelity may be an author’s ideal but can prove a producer’s ruin.

My first reaction to the picture was a mixture of aggravation, regret, and reluctant pleasure. Quite a few of the extraneous inventions (such as the macabre ping-pong scene or that rapturous swig of Scotch in the bathtub) struck me as appropriate and delightful. Others (such as the collapsing cot or the frills of Miss Lyon’s elaborate nightgown) were painful. Most of the sequences were not really better than those I had so carefully composed for Kubrick, and I keenly regretted the waste of my time while admiring Kubrick’s fortitude in enduring for six months the evolution and infliction of a useless product.

But I was wrong. Aggravation and regret soon subsided as I recollected the inspiration in the hills, the lawn chair under the jacaranda, the inner drive, the glow, without which my task could not have been accomplished. I told myself that nothing had been wasted after all, that my scenario remained intact in its folder, and that one day I might publish it—not in pettish refutation of a munificent film but purely as a vivacious variant of an old novel.