PDS: Written by yourself?
VN: Which I wrote myself, of course; and now I’m wondering whether I would be able to recite it in Russian. Let me explain it: There are two persons involved, a boy and a girl, standing on a bridge above the reflected sunset and there are swallows skimming by. The boy turns to the girl and says to her “Tell me, will you always remember that swallow?—not any kind of swallow, not those swallows there, but that particular swallow that skimmed by?” And she says “Of course I will,” and they both burst into tears.
PDS: What language do you think in?
VN: I don’t think I think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who reads a newspaper in a tram who moves his lips as he reads or as he thinks. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will crop up with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
Success of Lolita
PDS: You started writing in Russian and then you switched to English, didn’t you?
VN: Yes, that was a very difficult kind of switch. My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English.
PDS: You have written a shelf of books in English as well as your books in Russian. And of them only Lolita is well known. Does it annoy you to be the Lolita man?
VN: No, I wouldn’t say that, because Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of the theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
PDS: Were you surprised at the wild success when it came?
VN: I was surprised that the book was published at all.
PDS: Did you, in fact, have any doubts about whether Lolita ought to be printed, considering its subject matter?
VN: No; after all, when you write a book you generally envisage its publication in some far future. But I was pleased that the book was published.
PDS: What was the genesis of Lolita?
VN: She was born a long time ago, it must have been in 1939, in Paris; the first little throb of Lolita went through me in Paris in thirty-nine, or perhaps early in forty, at a time when I was laid up with a first attack of intercostal neuralgia, which is a very painful complaint. As far as I can recall, the first shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted in a rather mysterious way by a newspaper story, I think it was in the Paris Soir, about an ape in the Paris Zoo, who after months of coaxing by scientists produced finally the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, and this sketch, reproduced in the paper, showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.
PDS: Did Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged seducer, have any original?
VN: No. He’s a man with a mind and a man with an obsession, and I think many of my characters have sudden obsessions, different kinds of obsessions; but he never existed. He did exist after I had written the book. While I was writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen who seduced little girls: a kind of interesting coincidence but that’s about all.
PDS: Did Lolita herself have an original?
VN: No, Lolita didn’t have any original. She is perhaps a great-grand-niece, born in my own mind. She never existed. As a matter of fact, I don’t know little girls very well. When I think about the subject, I don’t think I know a single little girl. I’ve met them socially now and then, but Lolita is a figment of my imagination.
PDS: Why did you write Lolita?
VN: It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit but I like composing riddles and I like finding elegant solutions to those riddles that I have composed myself.
Seeing Letters in Color
PDS: How do you write? What are your methods?
VN: I find now that index cards are really the best kind of paper that I can use for the purpose. I don’t write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out part of the sky and part of the landscape and part of the—I don’t know, the carousing hunters.
PDS: Another aspect of your not entirely usual consciousness is the extraordinary importance you attach to color.
VN: Color. I think I was born a painter, really! And up to my fourteenth year, perhaps, I used to spend most of my time drawing and painting and I was supposed to become a painter in due time. But I don’t think I had any real talent there. However, the sense of color, the love of color, I’ve had all my life: and also I have this rather strange and freakish gift of seeing letters in color. Yes, yes: that’s called color hearing. Perhaps one in a thousand has that. But I’m told by psychologists that most children have it, that later they lose that aptitude when they are told by their parents that it’s all nonsense, that an ‘A’ isn’t black, and a ‘B’ isn’t brown—that you should not say that. It’s stupid, you know, that kind of thing.
PDS: What colors are your own initials, “V. N.”?
VN: “V” is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it’s called, technically, quartz pink: this is one of the closest colors that I can connect with the “V.” And the “N,” on the other hand, is a greyish-yellowish oatmeal color. But a funny thing happens: my wife has this gift of seeing letters in color, too, but her colors are completely different. There are, perhaps, two or three letters where we coincide, but otherwise the colors are quite different. It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the time—I think he was ten or eleven—sees letters in colors, too. Quite naturally he said, “Oh, this isn’t that color, this is this color,” and so on. Then we asked him to list his colors and we discovered that in one case, one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter “M.” So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if his genes were painting in aquarelle.
PDS: Whom do you write for? What audience?
VN: I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience that an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.
PDS: In your books there is an almost extravagant concern with masks and disguises: almost as if you were trying to hide yourself behind something, as if you’d lost yourself.
VN: Oh, no. I think I’m always there; there’s no difficulty about that. Of course, there is this certain type of critic who, when reviewing a work of fiction, keeps dotting all the “i’s” with the author’s head. Recently one anonymous clown, writing on Pale Fire in a New York book review, mistook all the declarations of my invented commentator in the book for my own. It is also true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my own opinions. There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. He says—let me quote it, if I can remember; yes, I think I can do it: “I loathe such things as jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake-thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks.” That’s how it goes.
PDS: It is obvious that neither John Shade nor his creator are very clubbable men.
VN: I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, c
ook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
PDS: It sometimes seems to me that in your novels there is a strain of perversity amounting to cruelty. In Laughter in the Dark, for instance, the tribulations of the hero, Albinus, are really dreadful after he has gone blind, and his mistress and her lover tease him.
VN: Well, what difference do you see between perversity and cruelty? I mean, could you define perversity, perhaps?
PDS: Cruelty is perverse.
VN: Oh, cruelty is perverse. Always perverse. Is a butcher always perverse? A butcher is cruel by definition. I don’t know. But I think that in that novel to which you refer, a novel that I wrote when I was a boy of twenty-six, say, I tried to express a world in terms as candid, as near to my vision of the world as I could. If I was cruel, I suppose it was because I saw the world as cruel in those days. I don’t think that there is a specially perverse or cruel streak in my writing. In life I’m a mild old gentleman. I’m very kind. There’s nothing cruel or brutal in me whatsoever.
Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
Alvin Toffler / 1964
From Playboy Magazine, January, 1964. © Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. and Alvin Toffler. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Few authors of this generation have sparked more controversy with a single book than a former Cornell University professor with the resoundingly Russian name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Lolita, his brilliant tragicomic novel about the nonplatonic love of a middle-aged man for a twelve-year-old nymphet, has sold 2,500,000 copies in the United States alone.
It has also been made into a top-grossing movie, denounced in the House of Commons, and banned in Austria, England, Burma, Belgium, Australia, and even France. Fulminating critics have found it to be “the filthiest book I’ve ever read,” “exquisitely distilled sewage,” “corrupt,” “repulsive,” “dirty,” “decadent” and “disgusting.” Champions of the book, in turn, have proclaimed it “brilliantly written” and “one of the great comic novels of all time”; while Nabokov himself has been compared favorably with every writer from Dostoyevsky to Krafft-Ebing, and hailed by some as the supreme stylist in the English language today. Pedants have theorized that the book is actually an allegory about the seduction of the Old World by the New—or perhaps the New World by the Old. And Jack Kerouac, brushing aside such lascivious symbolism, has announced that it is nothing more than a “classic old love story.”
Whatever it is, Nabokov would seem to be incongruously miscast as its author. A reticent Russian-born scholar whose most violent passion is an avid interest in butterfly collecting, he was born in 1899 to the family of a wealthy statesman in St. Petersburg. Fleeing the country when the Bolsheviks seized power, he made his way to England, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Cambridge. In the twenties and thirties he drifted between Paris and Berlin earning a spotty living as a tennis instructor and tutor in English and French; achieving a modest degree of fame as an author of provocative and luminously original short stories, plays, poems, and book reviews for the émigré press; and stirring praise and puzzlement with a trio of masterful novels in Russian—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, and Laughter in the Dark. Finding himself again a refugee when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Nabokov emigrated with his wife to the United States, where he began his academic career as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Now writing in English—in a style rich with inventive metaphors and teeming with the philosophical paradoxes, abstruse ironies, sly non sequiturs, multilingual puns, anagrams, rhymes, and riddles which both illuminate and obscure his work—he produced three more novels during his subsequent years as a professor in Russian and English literature at Wellesley, and then at Cornell. First came Bend Sinister, an unsettling evocation of life under a dictatorship; then Pnin, the poignant, haunting portrait of an aging émigré college instructor; and finally the erotic tour de force which was to catapult him almost overnight to worldwide eminence—Lolita.
This brief recital of biographical facts, however, outlines only the visible Nabokov, revealing nothing of the little-known interior man; for the labyrinth of his creative intellect has remained a hall of mirrors to all who have attempted to explore it. And his amused indifference to the most erudite appraisal of his work and worth has served merely to enhance the legend of his inscrutability. Shunning personal publicity, he grants interviews only rarely—having consented to see Playboy only after satisfying himself that the subjects we proposed to discuss were worthy of his attention.
Tweedy, bespectacled, absentmindedly professorial in mien, the sixty-four-year-old author greeted our interviewer, freelance writer Alvin Toffler, at the door of Nabokov’s quiet apartment on the sixth floor of an elegant old hotel on the banks of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva1, where he has lived and worked for the past four years—most recently producing Pale Fire, the extraordinary story of a gifted poet as seen darkly through the eyes of his demented editor, and a belated English translation of The Gift. In a weeklong series of conversations which took place in his study, Nabokov parried our questions with a characteristic mixture of guile, candor, irony, astringent wit, and eloquent evasiveness. Speaking in a curiously ornate and literary English lightly tinctured with a Russian accent, choosing his words with self-conscious deliberation, he seemed somewhat dubious of his ability to make himself understood—or perhaps skeptical about the advisability of doing so. Despite the good humor and well-bred cordiality which marked our meetings, it was as though the shadowed universe within his skull was forever beckoning him away from a potentially hostile world outside. Thus his conversation, like his fiction—in which so many critics have sought vainly to unearth autobiography—veils rather than reveals the man; and he seems to prefer it that way. But we believe our interview offers a fascinating glimpse of this multileveled genius.
Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than thirty years—to both acclaim and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational bestseller. In the aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
Vladimir Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a moment, in 1950 and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert Humbert’s little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course, she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
Playboy: Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer—so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, “Of course, they’ll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her sixteen and Humbert twenty-six.” Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product?
VN: I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different motels at which they stayed. All I did was write the screenplay, a preponderating portion of wh
ich was used by Kubrick.
Playboy: Do you feel that Lolita’s twofold success has affected your life for the better or for the worse?
VN: I gave up teaching—that’s about all in the way of change. Mind you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around sixty, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870's—without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from eight A.M. to ten thirty A.M. About one hundred and fifty students—unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that … ? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their blue-books, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 10