SHE WAS Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four foot ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.

But to Humbert Humbert she was always Lolita.

Yes and to me too. I have always had a place in my heart for poor Lolita, not merely because her illicit lover is commemorated in (the home town of) Ballina (the Humbert Monument). Lolita - the nymphet herself - is a tragedy in the unmaking and a comedy in the unmasking, and her mother, both funnier and sadder, is 10 times worse. Humbert meanwhile is a prince among perverts, with a prose style to match.

Lolita the book is a glittering work of art and that is all that needs to be said.

However, as this leaves me a few paragraphs short, I will carry on regardful. (I am far too cute to carry on regardless.)

Today, the much abused, far from innocent young Lolita (and far from innocent long before she encountered Humbert Humbert) is at "the heart" of a debate, Heaven help us, about "the problem of paedophilia in art". Any decade now we can probably expect a debate about the problem of alcoholism in art, or the problem of murder in art, or the problems of global destruction or drug addiction or wife beating in art, any of which might justifiably be presumed to be more common place and lethal considerations, but who can predict fashion in this area? Not I.

Anyway. I am surprised and amused (arranges features carefully into 50-50 representation) that my colleague Fintan should imagine that American film distributors have had moral qualms about Adrian Lyne's new film of Nabokov's book. Fintan sees the Americans' nervousness as "a welcome sign that commercial culture is beginning to think again about its responsibility to protect the idea of childhood that it has done so much to threaten".

It must be that I am more cynical, for I think that commercial culture, especially the US variety, nowadays accepts no responsibility but that of making money for its shareholders. "Moral Qualms" could be a sleepy backwater on the Maine coastline (hang a left at Shady Creek) for all American film distributors may know or care. Any qualms they just might have almost certainly relate to the potential nightmare of losing out on a money spinning film.

I myself see in their apparent wavering, or rather in the carefully placed reports of wavering, little more than a blatant publicity stunt for the movie itself, which despite the orchestrated fuss will almost certainly be distributed in the US before very long.

I am aware of course that American publishers did more than waver when the manuscript of Lolita first singed their in trays over 40 years ago. Four of them instantly rejected it, one suggesting it might prove more acceptable if Lolita were a boy and Nabokov dropped the murderer's fancy prose style in favour of short "realistic" sentences.

This suggests publishers know or care little about art and that is no doubt the way it should be. Somebody has to keep an eye on the market, protect the public, predict trends and do all those other little important things with which artists refuse to concern themselves. That is why publishing is so full of (useful) mediocrity, which never knows anything higher than itself, and the odd talent, which instantly recognises genius (Thanks, A.C. Doyle).

I was not at all upset then when, in a Sunday Telegraph article recently ("How Lolita and I defeated Humbug"), Nigel Nicolson (whose firm Weidenfeld and Nicolson first published the book in England) summed up Lolita in what some might regard as the crassest of terms: "The novel is the story of a middle aged American, Humbert Humbert, who is attracted to Lolita, and marries then murders her mother in order to gain access to the child. Lolita responds to his advances. They travel through America, motel to motel, until inevitably she falls in love with a younger man."

That must be a classic in the genre of publisher's blurb. It is a pity therefore that it is marred by some inaccuracies. Humbert Humbert was not American. His mother was English, his father a Swiss citizen of mixed French and Austrian descent. Humbert himself, born in Paris, spent his early years at his father's French Riviera hotel (the Mirana). Humbert did not kill Lolita's mother: crossing the road to post a letter, she was crushed by a car. There is no evidence that Lolita ever fell in love with a younger man, though she did marry one - in Humbert's own words, her "incidental Dick".