The First Throb of Lolita

I first read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita a few years ago during a film course on screenplay adaptations, in conjunction with studying the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film. Lolita is one of those stories that brings out strong reactions in people; I've never met someone who felt simply "meh" towards it-- people find it either passionately compelling or passionately distasteful.

A few weeks ago when I read this previously rounded-up interview with author Martin Amis, I was struck by his Nabokov reference:

"Nabokov said, 'The first throb of Lolita went through me" when he read an account in a French newspaper of a monkey that had been taught to draw, and all the drawing consisted of were the bars of its cage. That was Lolita."

-Martin Amis, "Martin Amis: Redux" via The Morning News

And I went on the hunt for the primary source of that story. It's from an essay Nabokov wrote in 1959 for Encounter (with its own fascinating back story, being an Anglo-American intellectual/cultural magazine that was covertly funded by the CIA to suppress cold war neutralism. Tangent. Links to come in the next Round Up). He writes that the story had no textual influence on the story, but something about the shiver of emotions the newspaper story invoked sparked his early drafts. Similarly, the desperation of the monkey drawing his own cage struck me, and I found myself looking for that same desperation in the novel.

Nabokov's essay, "On a Book Entitled Lolita" : http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1959apr-00073

Amongst the internet hunting, I also found this essay from Chicago Reader about the original draft of Nabokov's story, originally titled The Enchanter : http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/reading-the-first-throb-of-lolita/Content?oid=870862 . I especially enjoy the comparison of the opening lines from the first draft and the published novel.

"'How can I come to terms with myself?' he thought, when he did any thinking at all. 'This cannot be lechery. Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind promises eventual satiation.'"

versus the now famous opening lines of Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."