This Week in Literary History: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita premieres in New York.
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Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita premiered in New York this week in literary history. The novel itself, rejected repeatedly by American publishers, finally found a home with Paris's Olympia Press in 1955, a publisher better known for salacious fare. Kubrick's cinematic take transformed Nabokov's intricate prose into a different beast entirely, sparking its own debates about how to render the book's morally corrosive narrative on screen. The film's arrival in theaters marked a cultural flashpoint, testing American audiences' appetite for the novel's disturbing subject matter in a new medium.
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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1955, after many rejections from American publishers, by the Paris-based Olympia Press, who really specialized in books of a different sort entirely (other titles included Until She Screams, Tender Thighs, and There’s a Whip in My Valise). The novel was initially ignored, and then, after Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year, dismissed, and then banned, first in the UK and then in France.
When Lolita was finally published in the US, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, it became an instant sensation; the novel sold 100,000 copies in its first three weeks, the first book to do so since Gone With the Wind. Stanley Kubrick was no doubt pleased; he and producer James B. Harris had bought the film rights a few weeks before, for $150,000.
The pair asked Nabokov to write the script, but he wasn’t keen on the idea: “the honorarium they offered was considerable, but the idea of tampering with my own novel caused me only revulsion,” he later wrote in the foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay. But he changed his mind later that year, and soon began, as he put it, “an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion” with Kubrick, and by extension, with the censors. In order to appease the Production Code, and facing pressure from the Roman Catholic League of Decency, Lolita’s age was never referenced in the film, and the physical relationship between Lolita and Humbert Humbert went undepicted. In the final film, hints abound.
Lolita premiered in New York on June 13, 1962. Sue Lyon, who turned 15 during production, starred as the titular “nymphet,” along with James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze, and Peter Sellers as Quilty. Reviews were spirited and mixed (Pauline Kael’s ultimately positive one is worth the read) but the film has grown in general esteem ever since.
When Nabokov first saw the film (at a private screening before its premiere), he wrote, he “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.” (He was right; Kubrick’s final screenplay retained only about 20% of Nabokov’s version.) “The four main actors deserve the very highest praise,” Nabokov told Playboy in 1964. “Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car, these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze.” He did stress, though, that he had “nothing to do with the actual production,” and if he had, there would have been a lot more emphasis on the motels.