venus febriculosa

“To play Humbert Humbert, the narcissistic self-styled “nympholept”, demands a brooding presence and a rich distinctive voice, and it is brooding, dark-voiced Brian Cox who will sit alone in Humbert’s prison cell on the Lyttelton stage, in Richard Nelson’s adaptation of Lolita.”

“When Nelson sent his adaptation, Cox hesitated and took advice; then realised that a one-man presentation would be truer to the book, which is essentially an apologia pro vita sua, than the films. “The voice of Humbert is embodied — his head, his mien — telling his story in his prison notebook, when he’s about to have his fatal heart attack.” (As Humbert writes: “My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story is to be properly understood.”) “It’s not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It’s Lolita as a memory, and a cathartic experience because it’s a tragedy.””

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6813294.ece

Revisiting the title sequence to Lolita: extraordinary. This solitary glimpse prefectly communicates everything in the film. Clever, eerie, strangely lurid, beautiful.

http://www.artofthetitle.com/2009/02/13/lolita/

In addition to mentioning our competition, the blog Greater Than Equal To came up with a series of compelling links relating to Lolita covers. Check it out below to see a clip of Nabokov himself commenting on several of them, as well as a link to an interview with Vintage Books art director and cover designer John Gall in which he discusses his clever and controversial Lolita cover that never made it into print, at least not with its controversy intact.

“After retrenching I came up with one of my favorite covers of all time. A very simple variation on a standard Lolita theme yet with a very subversive twist. I was surprised how well it went over, but after a day or so everyone started to get a little queasy looking at it (myself included). So the twist was taken out and we have what the New York Post said was the “raciest cover yet” for Lolita. If they only knew.”

http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/08/lolita-covers/

As I mentioned below, Barbara Bloom, an artist keenly interested in Nabokov, redesigned all of the author’s book covers in 1999. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find her design for Lolita, but here are six other titles.

American artist Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) , often mentioned in the same breath as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, has a bit of a Nabokov obsession. For instance, she has redesigned the covers of each of Nabokov’s works and is known to collect Nabokov’s personal copies of his own works. In 1999 she recreated the two-volume Olympia Press Lolita (complete with the author’s handwritten annotations) as a set of rugs. Not  being much of an art scholar, I am not sure of the meaning behind this, but it is definitely intriguing! Thanks to Jean-Pierre for the heads up!

Orion Books’ imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson has commissioned new cover artwork from Minneapolis-based advertising agency Fallon for limited editions of nine works of fiction to celebrate their sixty years of publishing, among them

“…Lolita featuring a cherry die-cut and an endpaper by Louisa Scarlet Gray. Cherries ripening on the tree have come to be associated with feminine chastity and, when plucked, the loss of innocence or virtue. The bright end-papers featuring drawings of dolls further plays on this duality and that of child versus adult.”

 It’s a curious cover. I’m not so sure about those cherries nor, for that matter, the endpapers. Cherries, really? To me it seems almost shockingly kneejerk. The endapers are curious as well. Other books in the series seem not to have fared much better, relying as they all do on a single cut out image through which a small portion endpaper shows.  

http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/HB-46281/Lolita.htm

 Thanks to Patty for sending this Berkeley Medallion Edition from 1977 that is missing from Dieter Zimmer’s online gallery Covering Lolita. By the way, I have already received several submissions for the Lolita Cover Contest and they are quite interesting! When the contest ends and the winner has been selected I am going to post a gallery of all the entries.

It’s amazing what one can find online for next to nothing. Today I received in the mail a charming little book on Nabokov that I purchased used through Amazon for one cent (!) plus $3.99 shipping. Published by The Overlook Press, and part of a series called Overlook Illustrated Lives that includes titles on Beckett, Proust, Kafka, among others, this volume was written by Jane Grayson, Lecturer in Russian at University College London. Inside are a ten dozen photos and illustrations in addition to what appears to be a tidy biographical overview that includes a chronology and bibliography, all in 150 pages. Best of all are many photos I’ve never seen before, and three I find especially interesting. One is of Nabokov reclining under a tree one sunny day in 1944 with two female students from his Russian language class at Wellesley.  Another shows Vladimir and Vera with Dorothy Leuthold, one of Nabokov’s future pupils at Stanford who drove them from New York to California, posed against some drab pre-war sedan. Nabokov appears bizarrely Tom Joad-like, tall and lanky, with a floppy straw hat and swimming in baggy trousers and ill fitting shirt. He holds in the crook of his right arm a butterfly net. The last image is of Nabokov’s grave outside Montreux, a horizontal headstone of black granite floating above a low granite plinth. It’s quite lovely.

http://www.overlookpress.com/book-detail.php?book_isbn=1-58567-263-7&last_url=lives.php

August 18, 1958 was Lolita‘s US publication date. Less than a month later, Kubrick purchased the movie rights for $150,000 plus 15% of the producer’s profits. That represented a huge sum for Nabokov, given the fact that at the time his compensation at Cornell University was $11,000 per year (it had recently been raised from $9,000). In addition, Nabokov was paid $40,000 for writing the screenplay for Lolita with an additional $35,000 to be paid if it were a solo screenplay in addition to travel and living expenses (All of this, of course, made Nabokov a rich man to which he famously responded by retiring from teaching and moving to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life). In fact, Kubrick used very little of Nabokov’s screenplay (which was ultimately published in 1974), although Nabokov labored over it for most of 1960, supplying Kubrick with extensive revisions.

Nabokov’s commented that “only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used” and the relationship between the film and his novel was “a lovely misty view seen through mosquito netting” and “a scenic drive as perceived by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance.”

From Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by Brian Boyd:

“…with Sue Lyon looking seventeen and Humbert’s passion for nymphets entirely omitted, the film lost all the horror and tension of the novel. Under the eye-catching photos of Sue Lyon and the lollipop had appeared the question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Critics answered: “They didn’t.”…Years later Kubrick himself confessed: “Had I realized how severe the [censorship] limitations were going to be, I probably wouldn’t have made the film.” He also named the film his only manifest failure, and explained it by the fact that the book was simply too good to adapt for the screen.”

Over at The Kubrick Site there are two fascinating essays, which have me rethinking my ambivalence towards the film.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0106.html

In late 1964, Alfred Hitchcock approached Nabokov with the idea of having him provide the story for for a future film project. In a letter dated 19 November, Hitchock includes two outlines for possible movie scenarios, one a rather conventional spy thriller, the other involving a young girl enmeshed in a hotel run be her crooked relatives, apparently neither of which appealed to Nabokov. He responded on 28 November with a few ideas of his own, including this one:

“A girl, a rising star of not quite the first magnitude, is courted by a budding astronaut. She is slightly condescending to him; has an affair with him but may have other lovers, or lover, at the same time. One day he is sent on the first expedition to a distant star; goes there and makes a successful return. Their positions now have changed. He is the most famous man in the country while her starrise has come to a stop at a moderate level. She is only too glad to have him now, but soon realizes that he is not the same as he was before his flight. She cannot make out what the change is. Time goes, and she becomes concerened, then frightened, then panicky. I have more than one interesting denoument for this plot.”

Hitchcock replied that the story was not in his genre, and it does seem more of an idea for an episode of The Twilight Zone. Still, it is intriguing to imagine how such a story would develop when fleshed out by Nabokov and made into a film by Hitchcock.