...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.

—Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay

I’m a playwright, and I know all about this sort of tragedy and comedy and fantasy.

Clare Quilty, in the film Lolita

There’s never been anything in movies quite like the Vladimir Nabokov-Stanley Kubrick collaboration that produced Lolita. It was an encounter of two artists with very peculiar sensibilities and highly idiosyncratic styles, neither of whom you could mistake for the other—or for anyone else. Nabokov was at the peak of his talents when he turned out the novel, and Kubrick was certainly at the peak of his when he made the movie. (I’d go so far as to say that Kubrick had only two years of creativity left. After Dr. Strangelove, in 1964, he took a header into a chill, monumental brand of filmmaking, heralded by the monolith in 2001, from which he hasn’t emerged.) Both the writer and the director are bold and very self-conscious, but whereas Nabokov writes in fleet curlicues, glancing smilingly over his shoulder to acknowledge the curve of one smoke ring before it spins into another, Kubrick’s hybrid-noir style is frontal, block-lettered. Nabokov’s a painter, graceful and wry; Kubrick’s a sculptor, specializing in bas-relief—The Killing, Paths of Glory, and especially his extraordinary full-blooded epic Spartacus are inhabited by figures delineated with hyper-clarity against magnificently detailed landscapes.

Painters don’t need to be interested in drama; sculptors do—the process of hewing a figure out of marble or stone is inherently dramatic. And in fact Nabokov isn’t much of a dramatist in Lolita, which has a gag version of an 18th century epistolary frame—a moral disclaimer—and a rambling, fragments-from-a-diary movement. (God knows he’s even less dramatic when he writes a parody like Pale Fire, where the most dramatic action is in the way the novel peels, like an onion, to smaller and smaller layers and finally to a sweet, pungent nothing.) Kubrick, on the other hand, has to think in dramatic terms; when he stops doing that—in 2001—you can feel the audience detaching, even though they may applaud the impressiveness of the fireworks display.

Neither of these men arrives at emotion in any conventional way; awed by their finesse and their temperament, you may think their showpiece styles have distanced you from them, so you can’t fathom how you could be so moved by the end. But they accomplish it through different means. Nabokov seems to steer away from feeling with his gaily colored linguistic conceits and literary games and the self-amused ironies of Humbert’s first-person narration, while actually he keeps it throbbing right underneath, fueling his rapturous odes to Lolita. It’s there mostly in what Humbert doesn’t say, and then almost says a page before the end:

This, then, is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.

Nabokov makes you laugh straight through, and at the end you’re sucked into a vortex of melancholy that was whirring around at the center of the book all along. Kubrick gets at emotion the way a sculptor does—physically. It’s in the way his actors look and move, especially the men: Sterling Hayden in The Killing, Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory, Douglas and Tony Curtis and Woody Strode in Spartacus. (By Dr.Strangelove, emotion has vanished from Kubrick’s work, to resurface only when the rare actor supplies it: Malcolm McDowell in parts of A Clockwork Orange, Shelley Duvall in the second half of The Shining.)

The interaction between Nabokov and Kubrick clearly altered what each brought to the project. The movie is as much unlike Kubrick’s other films as it is similar to them; it’s more delicate, with more complex emotional hues. (Partly, I think, that’s the contribution of the photographer, Oswald Morris, who softens the stark lighting Kubrick favors in his other black and white movies. Morris may be responsible, too, for the sensuous compositions you don’t find anywhere else in Kubrick—like the shot of Sue Lyon’s Lolita on a motel bed, kicking off her shoes as she looks up at James Mason’s Humbert in the upper-left-hand corner of the frame, the arc of her legs echoed in the curve of her silky golden hair and in the position of the two bodies.) And though the movie limps toward its ending—the last sequence, Humbert’s reunion with a now married and pregnant Lolita, is disappointingly clunky—until then it’s a trim, elegantly driven piece of dramatic writing, with one of the triumphant framing scenes in American movies, where Humbert stalks and finally shoots his rival, Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), in the post-binge gloom of Quilty’s Gothic mansion. The screen Lolita opens with a psychically disintegrated Humbert; then, retreating four years into the past (and shifting to a voice-over narration by Mason), it begins to tell the story of how he got that way.

The mystery of the collaboration was mostly solved in 1974, when Nabokov published Lolita: A Screenplay, which was substantially different from the Kubrick movie and revealed, in a foreword, that though he’d received full credit for the screenplay, what in fact ended up in the movie contained “only ragged odds and ends of my script.” According to the foreword, a wonderfully funny (and typically Nabokovian) fillip in which the author sets the screenwriting process amid butterfly-hunting jaunts (“A certain lull in the activity of the local lepidoptera suggest...that we might just as well drive on to the West Coast...we collected the Inyo Blue and other nice bugs”), the partnership of director and screenwriter began in an “an amiable battle of suggestion and counter-suggestion” but eventually became basically one-sided. Kubrick’s “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.” What was evidently happening was that Kubrick, possibly acknowledging that Nabokov (as he admits here, the “amiable battle” notwithstanding) was temperamentally unsuited to collaboration, simply kept close-mouthed about his real response to Nabokov’s progress. He did finally inform the author, upon completion of the script, that it was unwieldy and overlong (nearly three times the length it ended up being, two and a half hours), and suggested a variety of changes. Nabokov prepared a revision, and Kubrick okayed it, in September 1960. And, until a private screening in June 1962, just days before the premiere, Nabokov says he had no idea that Kubrick had tampered with the last draft.

Nabokov’s assessment of what he saw that night, and generally of the divergence between his point of view and Kubrick’s, is unusually generous in an author whose work has been drastically altered behind his back. For though “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,” still he bears Kubrick no grudge and affirms that the publication of his screenplay is not meant as a “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.” He walked away from the movie convinced “that Kubrick was a great director [and] that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors.”

This fair-mindedness seems, if not remarkable, certainly the only appropriate reaction to Kubrick’s version when you finally read Nabokov’s script. It isn’t much good, though it garnered some serious attention when it came out in print. (That’s hardly a surprise. The movie Lolita was underrated on its original release, and has rarely been treated with anything like the enthusiasm critics routinely lavish on Strangelove, which is terrific but not as terrific, or on the blowhard 2001, and on the appalling A Clockwork Orange.) It’s fun to see what Nabokov comes up with, and some of it does make you laugh: a psychiatrist named Dr. John Ray who tells Humbert’s story as a suitable case for treatment (his prosaic, straight-to the-camera explications are reminiscent of both the stiff who over-enunciates on the trailer for talking pictures in Singin ’ in the Rain and the humorless shrink who explains Anthony Perkins’s behavior at the end of Psycho); a montage of assorted nymphets that translates some of the very early, pre-Lolita portions of the novel (which Kubrick skips over); sexual puns that didn’t make it into the movie (though an amazing amount of them did for 1962); some nifty lines (Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, lighting up a cigarette, confesses to Humbert, “I’m a tissue of little vices”); a middle-aged tourist named Edda Hopson who pursues Humbert quite late in the story (and very briefly), and who tells him, after praising his stepdaughter’s “virgin bloom”: “I’m a bit of an artist, and in fact have exposed”; some wittily expressed images, like “Quilty’s pudgy hands which are briefly seen meatfly clapping” and “[Humbert] broods among the fruit, a rotting Priap, listening to a melon, questioning a peach, pushing his wire cart towards the lacquered strawberries.” But most of the oddball devices—postcards, diagrams, visual jokes that are really transposed literary ones, the recurring voice of Dr. Ray toward the end, and a real stinker of an idea involving a butterfly collector named Vladimir Nabokov—intrude on the narrative. And it seems to take Nabokov forever to set up the simplest plot turn. Humbert discovers on page 187 that Lolita has fled; it takes the script fourteen pages to bring them together again, six of which are devoted to a clumsy scene in a college lecture hall (Humbert teaches literature) meant to justify his receiving a letter from her. (Kubrick cuts from Humbert’s despair at losing Lolita to her typing the letter—requesting money—that Nabokov finally gets to on page 200.)

You can see Nabokov’s impulses aren’t dramatic ones. Setting Humbert’s adoration of Lolita in the context of his general obsession with nymphets and his Poe-esque lost childhood love works in the novel (where it’s meant partly as a parody of Freudian psychology), but in the script it has the effect of blurring the focus and making Lolita appear less significant. Nabokov has trouble getting both Lolita’s and Charlotte’s voices—their lines are often awkward, in a stiff, literary way, as if he’d envisioned them as outgrowths of Humbert’s style. (Here’s Charlotte’s most unreadable speech, about her daughter: Charlotte nudges a simmering Humbert (James Mason). “Exaggerating is all hers. How I hate that diffused clowning—what they call ‘goofing off.’ In my day, which after all was only a couple of short decades ago, I never indulged in that sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style.”) Charlotte’s better worked out as a character here than she is in the novel, but it’s Kubrick who comes up with a throughline for her: pursuing Humbert. In the novel, her love letter to him is a complete surprise to us as well as to Humbert and in the novel, where we’re in Humbert’s consciousness, that’s a fine idea. In the script, you can see Nabokov realizes he has to prepare for her amorous assault, but he doesn’t know how to plant it, so he just tosses it in—Humbert turns a corner at the high school dance where he and Charlotte are chaperones, and suddenly there she is, making advances at him. Maybe Nabokov intends it as a sexual reflex; a moment earlier we see her renewing her acquaintance with Quilty, the TV playwright who will eventually steal Lolita from Humbert. (Evidently Charlotte and Quilty had a one-night—or one-afternoon—stand when Quilty appeared in town at a speaking engagement.) But Charlotte’s desperate amorousness is given no preparation in the thirty-two pages of script between her introduction and the dance.

A few of Nabokov’s ideas have been discarded for reasons that you can guess at, and that he couldn’t have anticipated. There’s a motif that may have seemed too close to what Truffaut does with Jeanne Moreau in the early scenes of the previous year’s Jules and Jim. (Nabokov has set it up as an accompaniment to his literary metaphor, Poe with his child-bride, and perhaps in order to justify ending his script with the book’s final lines, spoken, of course, by Humbert: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”) The suggestion that Lolita, married to Dick Schiller, has begun to take on some of her mother’s mannerisms probably went out the window when Kubrick cast Shelley Winters as Charlotte and Sue Lyon as Lolita, since they aren’t physically similar enough to eachother, and presumably Lyon lacked the experience to carry off something so tricky. And Kubrick threw out the episode—from the novel, just like the viusal linking of mother and daughter—where Humbert tries but can’t bring himself to drown Charlotte. He substituted a voice-over fantasy about shooting her with her first husband’s revolver—because, I assume, Shelley Winters had already played the drowning scene, famously, in A Place in the Sun in 1951 and audiences would likely still recognize it. The way Kubrick (or uncredited collaborators) have rewritten this scene, it segues from Humbert’s dismayed discovery that Charlotte intends to send Lolita off to boarding school as soon as she returns from summer camp, so she can be alone with her new husband, to the gun reverie, straight to his coming upon Charlotte reading his diary, where she finds herself maligned amid his rhapsodies about her daughter. The scene plays brilliantly; the telescoping reduces the Humbert/Charlotte marriage to perhaps ten minutes of screen time and gives the movement toward Charlotte’s serendipitous death in a car accident (after she’s run out of the house in despair) exactly the sort of abruptness it needs; you experience her elimination as an absurd jolt. This is the kind of dramatic stitching Nabokov just isn’t capable of—or, perhaps, isn’t much interested in.

It’s Nabokov, however, who comes up with the idea of fleshing out Claire Quilty’s presence in the movie. In the novel Quilty is a phantom, always hinted at but never alluded to specifically until Lolita, two years after she’s dropped out of Humbert’s life, reveals the name of the man she ran away with. Quilty’s really a literary game, like all the “V” figures in Thomas Pynchon’s V, and Nabokov obviously realizes he won’t translate without major rethinking. So he inverts the story, beginning with the murder at Quilty’s mansion, and he brings Quilty into the high school dance (which is also an invention of Nabokov’s script) for an exchange with Charlotte Haze that introduces Quilty’s interest in Lolita (“Say, didn’t you have a little girl? Let me see. With a lovely name. A lovely lilting lyrical name—”) Nabokov goes so far as to stage a meeting between the two nymphet lovers in Beardsley, Ohio (where Humbert settles down to teach college and becomes insanely possessive of his stepdaughter) at which Quilty, for once, plays himself and not one of the loopy roles he keeps taking on to confuse and hoodwink Humbert. Kubrick excised the scene.

The fact that Nabokov came up with the frame shows you how surprising the filmmaking process can be. I’ve said Nabokov was no dramatist, but this is the most dramatic idea in the picture, and I think what Kubrick made of it is the scene most people who’ve seen Lolita remember most vividly. Baroque and hilarious it’s reminiscent of the Xanadu opening of Citizen Kane, and it has the same effect of beckoning you into a realm so strange you know that what follows is bound to baffle your expectations. Lolita's initial scene is our first indication that we’re entering a world veering out of control, a sense that’s confirmed by Peter Sellers’s performance.

The opening scene of the movie isn’t much as Nabokov wrote it, though, and you have to assume, as you do with all of Sellers’s scenes, that he made up most of what he does in it. When James Mason’s Humbert, roaming through his living room, calls his name, the dust-cloth on a couch moves suddenly, causing beer bottles to clink and tumble, and Quilty emerges from underneath, introducing himself as a Roman senator before sloshing over to the ping-pong table and challenging Humbert to a game. (The garb is, of course, a joking reference to Kubrick’s Spartacus.) Sellers’s accent is echt Brooklynese, but some of it sounds like baby talk, and he has a fleshy baby face. In the course of the scene he counters Humbert’s end-of-the-rope homicidal seriousness by constantly shifting, adopting new accents as he spoofs different movie roles: the old westerner (a Walter Brennan type), the boxing champ, the Tin Pan Alley composer at the piano, creating, creating.

Sellers’s riff on a variety of movie genres prepares us for the Quilty masquerade that dances through the rest of the film, but I think it has another purpose, too. Nabokov in his novel has a satiric take on suburban America, and on the candied America of motels and resorts and landmarks, which is so weird as to seem extraterrestrial. (It’s one of the incidental pleasures of reading the book.) Kubrick has his own equivalent: a teen-besieged America of high school dances and hula hoops and cha-cha steps, where the title character looks like Sandra Dee (and her phone number is 1776). It’s an America the movies might have invented—in a genre (teen pics) like all the other genres Kubrick nods to, quoting the gangster classic Little Caesar in the shooting of Quilty and even staging the first physical contact between Humbert and Lolita at a drive-in horror movie at which Humbert squires both mother and daughter. (The allusions to Orson Welles, in the opening and in the use of Wellesian expressionist deep-focus shots later in the picture, seem to form part of this American-movie quilt; so does the recycled Chaplin routine involving the troublesome cot at The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, a failed bit of slapstick.) When Quilty appears at the dance with his mysterious partner, Vivian Darkbloom, and executes a sort of suspended-motion jitterbug, he sends up the whole institution of teenage suburban America, which Kubrick has deliberately peopled with all the bland TV-style actors he can find—and which, as the British emigre Humbert learns when Charlotte and the Farlows join forces to hook him in as a suitor for Charlotte, extends its own tentacles. In Nabokov’s screenplay, Quilty—at this point an invisible voice on the end of a telephone, harassing Humbert, demanding to know if he’s adopted Lolita—replies to Humbert’s “I assume that a stepfather is a relative and the relative a natural guardian’’ with the question, “Are you aware that the word ‘natural’ has rather sinister connotations?” In Kubrick’s movie, the words ‘benign’ and ‘familiar’ are as sinister as any in the dictionary—which makes sense in a story in which the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old bundle of sweetness who’s allegedly the victim of a middle-aged man’s perversion turns out to be duplicitious and manipulative and fully eroticized, the seducer rather than the seduced. Lolita’s awareness is part of what makes Lolita a comedy; the way she leaves poor, desperate Humbert in the dust is what makes it his tragedy.

Peter Sellers’s Clare Quilty, man of a thousand faces, is the movie’s most outrageous component, its wild card. Popping up at a police convention that has laid siege to The Enchanted Hunters, he has a tumbledown, Mae West lilt in his voice as, speaking to the camera, his back to Humbert, he claims a kinship between them, since they’re both such “normal guys.” (In Nabokov’s version it’s a doctors’ convention; the idea that the motel where Humbert and Lolita first have sex is overrun with cops is Kubrick’s hilarious twist, which Gus Van Sant borrows in Drugstore Cowboy.) Sellers is amazing: his voice wriggles like a worm on a hook, and his face goes through innumerable contortions. His nervous suggestiveness in this tête-à-tête with Humbert could be homosexual or psychopathic; Harold Pinter could have written his convoluted dialogue, or Groucho Marx. In the Beardsley sequence, he appears in the equally invented role of Dr. Zempf, the psychologist at Lolita’s school, to persuade Humbert to allow her to perform in the school play. It’s Quilty’s play, so her participation will enable them to steal some time together. At this point Sellers wears specs and a ridiculous moustache and a quart of hair oil, and his Teutonic accent is a warm-up for Dr. Strangelove. He calls Humbert “Dr. Hombarts” and refers to Lolita and her classmates as “publes” (a Nabokovian pun Kubrick managed to get around the censors).

One of the most striking elements of the opening exchange between Humbert and Quilty is the way Peter Sellers’s style plays off James Mason’s. Sellers does splintered stand-up comic lunacy; Mason’s Humbert is in an elegant agony—tragic lunacy. In a career that spans half a century and includes magnificent performances in movies like Odd Man Out, A Star Is Born, The Deadly Affair, The Sea Gull and The Shooting Party, his Humbert Humbert is Mason’s most indelible creation. In the scenes based around the Haze home in Ramsdale, New Hampshire (where Humbert goes from summer boarder to husband and stepfather), he’s a silky roue who executes every scheming step to bring Lolita closer with a Noel Coward springiness. He glides free-style over some of the funniest lines in American movies—whee!—like his begging off from a late night with Charlotte because he fears “my neuralgia is about to strike....With heartburn, an old ally.” (The pun is straight from Nabokov’s script.) But he keeps you conscious of how deep Humbert’s obsession with his nymphet runs. When Charlotte tells him she’s sending Lolita off to Camp Climax (Kubrick got away with that, too), Mason’s line readings turn fuzzy, as if he’d lost control of his mouth; alone in the girl’s bedroom after she’s departed, he buries his head in her sheets and by the time he comes up for air, he looks cobwebbed in his own misery.

His shifts are, in their own way, as astonishing as Sellers’s. He’s in masterly control of the situation when he cuddles with Charlotte in bed: he hands out sexual treats like chocolate-cream rewards to a well-be- haved child. But then she mentions boarding school and he loses his focus, finally turning away from her and curling up in the fetal position. He grows distracted, then sullen and finally snarling—a pet dog unexpectedly afflicted with distemper. In Beardsley, he presides over Lolita’s life like a tyrant, forbidding her any time to herself because he’s sure she’s dying to deceive him with some adolescent hunk. (In Nabokov’s version, he mostly begrudges her the hours she saves for her girl friends, fearing that they’re sharing confidences and that his relationship with Lolita is a ripe topic for schoolgirl gossip.) But he’s equally a slave, tenderly slipping cotton balls between her toes as he paints them for her, bending himself to her whims. Nabokov turned Lolita into Charlotte, but when Mason’s Humbert staggers wearily through one more quarrel he can’t win with his step-daughter, nagging and snapping and yelling at her not to smudge the toenails he’s just finished polishing, you’re shocked to realize that it’s he who’s taken over the role of Lolita’s mother.

As Charlotte, Shelley Winters gives her own incomparable impression of tragicomic high style. She talks with a pretentious musicality that alternates with a whining stutter, nervously loading her sentences with “uhs” and “ohs” like quavering arpeggios on an increasingly precarious scale to keep Humbert from losing interest while she shows off her pretty eyes. The straining-to-be-cosmopolitan vocal effect goes along with the cigarette holder and the interpolated French phrases and her talk of Ramsdale’s intellectual advancement and the way she pronounces “Van Gogh” as “Van Gock,” coming down on the final “k” sound with the head of a hammer. Charlotte says things like “I really believe that it’s only in the romance languages that one is able to really relate in a mature fashion” and (to the Farlows at the dance) “Your Mona looks simply enchanting in that cloud of pink,” giving herself away every time she opens her mouth. Nabokov doesn’t have much affection for her, except when Humbert begins to see hints of her daughter in her, but Kubrick does; he even allows her to display some liberal concern about Lolita’s adolescence—until she begins to see the girl as an annoyance, an obstacle stealing away her precious moments alone with Humbert. (Before she reads his diary, she doesn’t dream that Humbert is orchestrating those intrusions as much as Lolita is.)

Of course, you can’t tell how much of the direction Kubrick takes with this character developed after he’d cast Shelley Winters; it’s hard to imagine not feeling something for one of this actress’s doe-eyed suffocating monsters, afloat in a flood of their own hysteria, because they’re so exposed and so absolutely what they are. (She does a couple of doozies later on for Paul Mazursky, in Blume in Love and Next Stop, Greenwich Village.) When Winters’s Charlotte, now Humbert’s bride, feels he’s neglecting her, she stands outside the closed door to his study with her face simultaneously full and melting, drunk on a mixture of sexual grieving and little-girl poutiness. Winters has one of the great woebegone looks in movies: her eyes throb with hurt but stay light, her nose twitches, and she twists her mouth into a pretzel. And when Charlotte finds the diary, Winters takes her right over the edge. She swings the volume wide in his general direction, but somehow it finds its mark, and she lets out a damaged giggle as she turns the volume way up, finally screeching that he’ll never see that brat again as she staggers out of the room. She has a few priceless moments alone with the urn that holds her beloved first husband’s ashes (“Forgive me! You were the soul of integrity!”) before she leaves the movie for good.

Sharing the screen with these three phenomenal stylists, Sue Lyon is quite effective. Her inexperience works for her in the role, because Lolita is a sensual creature, not an intellectual one, so it’s better than we don’t see what goes on in her head. In fact, it’s funny when she screws up her brow and tries to focus on Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” which Humbert is explicating for her; you get the feeling this girl’s attention span is maybe five minutes on a very good day. (When Humbert drives past a dead cat on the highway, her discomfort passes instantly into a grunting immersion in the Coke and potato chips on her lap.) She’s smart—she’s certainly devious but she’s just not interested. Lyon has a clever way of looking distracted and jaded at the same time, so you always wonder if her air of distraction could be a cover for scheming thoughts. Sue Lyon’s a Sandra Dee who can act; I love the cynical smile she throws Quilty as she sashays onstage to deliver the curtain line of his play. I don’t think it’s fair to complain that she’s not in the same league as the other three leading performers, or to make her final scene a test of her acting: she’s unsure of herself here, but the scene itself is on very shaky ground. Most critics dismissed her work when the movie came out; she was an easy target for the sneering they came prepared to do. And her career never took off: she made ten more movies over the next decade and a half, though the only one anyone’s likely to have seen her in is The Night of the Iguana, in 1964.

What I mean by shaky ground is that Kubrick doesn’t really have a last scene for his picture. (The return to Quilty’s mansion is a coda, not a finale.) But then, Nabokov didn’t either. Somehow you want a more compelling finish for Lolita Haze than homemaking for dear, deaf Dick Schiller, who says things like “Call me if you need me for K.P., sweet- heart.” It’s one thing for Humbert’s adoration of his nymphet to turn into conventional possessiveness; men who love not wisely but too well always end up playing the fool in the literature of romance. But there’s something almost vindictive about the way Nabokov brings Lolita down at the end. In his screenplay, he kills her off in childbirth (probably echoing the untimely death of child Humbert’s little Annabel), but that’s even worse. She needs to retain some mystery, I think—like the woman in the painting (a Gainsborough?) behind which Quilty is felled by Humbert’s bullets, punctured by the violent despair to which his love has taken him but forever removed from it, unaffected by it, almost unconscious of it.