Word: lolitas
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...LOLITA HAS BECOME a sort of under-aged siren for the creators of stage and screen, luring writers and directors to crash on the undramatic shoals of Nabokov's first-person prose. First Stanley Kubrick in his 1962 movie, then some forgotten adapter in an early '70s musical, and now Edward Albee in this vulgarized comic drama have attempted to drag Nabokov's characters from the sheltering artistry of his novel into the coldly objective glare of the theater. It's beginning to become unpleasantly clear that Lolita's appeal to directors and audiences alike lies not in its author...
Nabokov is innocent of such salaciousness, though undoubtedly Lolita's paperback sales depend on it. In his novel, he skirts pornography on one side and moralizing on the other, traveling a high road of precise plot construction and delicately tuned poetry, elevating the sordid story to a level of intensity that has far more to do with art than with Brooke Shields. But for Albee, the purity of this book was just too tempting; he apparently couldn't wait to get his hands on Nabokov's little girl, turning her from an attractive but commonplace adolescent into a loud-mouthed...
...girl-children [are] nymphets," wrote Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita. Few indeed have the "fey grace... the slenderness of a downy limb" and other nascent charms so dear to a Humbert Humbert. Edward Albee, who is staging a drama based on the novel, chose Blanche Baker over hundreds of preteens to play eleven-year-old Lo to Donald Sutherland's fortyish Humbert. Blanche is 24, but well qualified. She was virtually born for the role: her mother, Carroll Baker, won stardom 24 years ago as the sensuous heroine of Baby Doll. As for Blanche's advanced age, she says...
...satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." So began Literature 311-312 at Cornell in the '50s, Professor Nabokov presiding. Teaching was of necessity Nabokov's livelihood in those pre-Lolita days, and he took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long émigré life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future...
This is nothing less than an artistic credo, a point that readers today can appreciate more readily than the students of Literature 311-312. The enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. -By Christopher Porterfield