RH: Have you given it a title?
VN: It’s a kind of provisional title. It’s called The Texture of Time. I’m not sure I’m going to use it. There’s a book called The Nature of Time. Rather interferes with that title. But it’s really about the texture of time, of the thing itself. It’s very, very difficult to write. I find the more I speak about it, the vaguer it gets. The difficulty about it is that I have to devise an essay, a scholarly-looking essay, on time, and then gradually turn it into the story I have in mind. The metaphors start to live. The metaphors gradually turn into the story because it’s very difficult to speak about time without using similes or metaphors. And my purpose is to have those metaphors breed. To form a story of their own, gradually, and then again to fall apart, and it will all end in this rather dry, though serious and well-meant, essay on time. It’s proved so difficult I really don’t know what to do about it. I think that the creative artist is an exile in his study, his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He’s quite alone there. He’s the lone wolf. As soon as he gets together with someone else, he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else.
RH: You mentioned your tennis. We’d like to shoot you playing.
VN: No, no, no, no. It’s out. First of all, I haven’t played for three years. Three years ago I could still play a good game, but I wouldn’t like to begin all of a sudden on a cold, autumn day. Anything might happen. It would make a beautiful picture: Death on the Tennis Court. But no, I think we’ll play football, that’s much better now.
RH: You mentioned a third sport.
VN: Chess is my third sport.
RH: Your indoor sport.
VN: Indoor. Strictly indoor. Very much so, yes.
RH: But we will be able to film you playing chess.
VN: Yes, if you like. It’s not a very active kind of film. It’s very quiet. It’s still, really.
RH: Do you see any connection between composing chess problems and composing your novels?
VN: Actually, I think it’s much the same thing. You also have the variations, the variance of which you have to choose. You also make false moves, and you make what chess problem composers call illusionary moves, deceitful moves. Sometimes a solution, a false solution, is prompted into the problem to mislead the solver, and the whole pleasure sometimes is in finding two or three false solutions, going through them, and coming at last to sometimes the very simple, actual solution of the problem. I think this kind of thing happens in my literary composition, too. Sometimes I don’t actually plan them, but they are there—those illusions, those delusions, those little labyrinths which seem to be the right trail, the right path to my object, but actually lead the good reader astray.
RH: What is your greatest pleasure in writing?
VN: There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper after many false tries, false moves. Finally, you have the sentence that you recognize as the one you are looking for, the one you had lost somewhere, sometime, and it seems perfect to you. It doesn’t mean that perhaps five years hence it won’t look to you horrible. The next pleasure, in my case, is of reading it to [my] wife. She and I are my best audience. I should say my main audience. After that, when the thing is published, I do imagine a number of people whom I like, whom I admire, with whom I feel close kinship, it is nice to think that those people are reading that, perhaps at this very instant. But that’s about all. I don’t care about the general public. I am sometimes very much touched by the fan letters I get, especially by those that I get from remote parts of the States—from Kansas, from Texas; from South America, too. People writing to me to tell me how much they enjoyed the book, and picking up, deliberately or not, little things which show me that they not only understood the book, but that they liked it from the same point of view as I liked it when I was composing it. I think that’s a great joy. That’s another kind of joy that’s much more human than this first thrill of diabolical pleasure in discovering that you have somehow cheated creation by creating something yourself. I think that takes care of your question.
Nabokov
Penelope Gilliatt / 1966
From Vogue, December, 1966. © The Estate of Penelope Gilliatt. Reprinted by permission.
“Is the Queen pregnant?” said Vladimir Nabokov.
“I don’t believe so,” I said.
“When I saw her on television at the World Cup watching football she kept making this gesture.” He did a mime of smoothing a dress.
“She always does that.”
“Oh, I see. A queenly movement. Permanently with child. With heir.” He chuckled and looked interested.
We met in a distant part of Switzerland. I had said to him on the hotel telephone, sounding to myself ludicrously like a character in Sherlock Holmes but assuming that he wouldn’t know it, that he could identify me downstairs in the lobby because I had red hair.
“I shall be carrying a copy of Speak, Memory,” he had said back. (Speak, Memory is his autobiography.)
His ear for the idiom was instant and exact. It turned out later that his father had known Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (“Though Conan Doyle was much more proud of his intolerably boring books on South Africa.”) Nabokov has a writer’s passion for the physical details and likes Holmes’s habit of passing half-a-crown through a chink in the cab to the cabdriver. He also has an intentness on the nuances of speech—Holmes’s, mine, anyone’s who uses English—that is made much more urgent by his exile from his own language.
Twenty-nine years ago he abandoned his “untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue,” which he had already used to write novels unpublishable in the Soviet Union and so not published at all, for an English that he learned first from governesses. Perhaps his command of it now is partly due to the obstacle, as a man will often think more swiftly who speaks with an impediment. Nabokov now writes a dulcet and raffish English that has found more of the secret springs of our language than most writers born to it can ever get under their fingers. For instance, he knows precisely the mechanism of an Anglo-Saxon use of bathos and rudeness, which will plant an anti-climactic word or a vernacular insult in a suave context where it goes off with a peculiar mixture of self-mockery and shabby bombast. For all that, his distress about losing Russian is obviously gnawing and will never be appeased. In the preface to Lolita he writes briefly about it as if he were an illusionist robbed of his luggage, performing on a stage where his plundered trickery has to be practiced without any of the apparatus of association.
It occurs to me that perhaps this is exactly what makes him write better about love than any other novelist in modern English. The afflictions of exile carry a taste of theft that is the pang of intimacy itself. The tricked focus in the experience of loving, the one that hideously connects rapture with mortality and causes lovers to hoard the present as though it were already gone, bestows a psychic foretaste of loss that is close to the one that gave the privileged Russian children of Nabokov’s age a genius for recollection. They lived their Russian youth with the intensity of the grown-up in love, mysteriously already knowing too much about losing it. The ache that clings to good fortune or great accord is one of time’s ugly gags, like the grasping housewife already secreted in the rapturous frame of little Lolita.
Humbert Humbert is in love with a booby trap. His whole situation hoaxes him. Lolita is an account of the passionate involvement of a man constantly ambushed by dépaysement and consigned to the plastic exile of motels. De paysé: de-countried: We need a word for it now in English far more than we need “deflowered.” It isn’t at all fully expressed by “alienation,” or “rootlessness,” for like the comic agony of love in Lolita, it is a concept of loss that includes the knowledge of what it can be to possess. Before I met Nabokov I had wondered sometimes how it was possible for a writer to live permanently in hotels, as he has done since 1960, mostly in Switzerland; but it was a stupid speculation about a great novelist of dépaysement who ca
rries his country in his skull. His landscape isn’t Russia, but Russian literature.
His permanent address now is a hotel in Montreux that he described as “a lovely Edwardian heap.” We met in the Engadine, where he and his wife had come for the butterflies, in another Edwardian heap with spa baths in the basement. He is a tall, loping man whose gait and way of peering reminded me faintly of Jacques Tati’s. “I am six foot,” he said. “I have very thin bones. The rest is flesh.” He picked at his arm as if it were a jacket.
In his autobiography he describes himself as having the Korff nose, passed on from his paternal grandmother’s side: “A handsome Germanic organ with a boldly boned bridge and a slightly tilted, distinctly grooved, fleshy end.” He wears spectacles, but switches to pince-nez after six to alter the ache in his nose. His accent is neither Russian nor American: I think it originates in the upper-class English undergraduate speech of immediately after the First World War, when he went to Cambridge. (“Cambridge, Cambridge, not Cambridge, Massachusetts,” he said.) His French is delicate and pure. He hears it as dated: “The slang goes back to Maupassant.” His Russian is the authentic sound of pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg. He did a mischievously expressive example of the boneless accent of standard Pravda speech now. I don’t suppose that either he or his wife can detect that their birth in itself is a distinct and commanding fact about them both; but then the upper-class people of Europe never do. It is only the rest who can see the difference, and the well-born truly believe themselves to be indistinguishable.
The Nabokovs think of going back to America to live, perhaps in California. They are looking for—what? A climate; and far more than that, a language. “We were in Italy, but we don’t want to live there. I don’t speak Italian. And the scioperi (strikes) … Véra found a chateau in France, but it would have cost a lot of money to convert it. It had drawbridges. It had its drawbridges and drawbacks.” He has a habit of going back over what he has said and correcting it that is rather like the way he immediately uses an eraser on his notes. “I don’t much care for de Gaulle. I fear things will happen there when he dies. I would go to Spain but I hate bullfights. Switzerland: lakes, charming people, stability. All my publishers pass through from one festival to another.”
He had been up since six, as usual, and had a bath in the curative basement. “I discovered the secret of levitation,” he said. “One puts the feet flat-braced against the end of the bath and rises, covered with bubbles like a fur. I felt like a bear. A memory of a former state.”
We had a drink rather early in the morning. The whiskies looked small and he asked for soda. “Make the glass grow,” he said, and then muttered: “The grass glow.”
His books are written on index cards so that it is possible to start in the middle and insert scenes as he wants. He writes in 3B pencils that he says he sharpens compulsively. They have India rubbers on the ends which he uses to exorcise mistakes instead of simply crossing them out. My own error in writing with a pen struck him as technically cardinal. His pocket notebooks are made of paper squared like an arithmetic book. The formal pattern that might distract most people obviously stimulates him. I could understand this: it must be a little like seeing figments in the black and white tiles in public lavatories.
“Some of my best poems and chess problems have been composed in bathrooms looking at the floor,” he said.
At some stage we started to play anagrams. I gave him “cart horse” (the solution is “orchestra”). He took the problem away on what was meant to be a nap, and came bounding into the bar two hours later with an expression that was a very Russian mixture of buoyancy and sheepishness. The tartanned paper of his little notepad was covered with methodically wrong steps. “Her actors,” he said, in try-on triumph, eying me, and knowing perfectly well that the answer had to be one word. Then he started to laugh at his picture of the creature whose property the actors would be. Bossy women strike him as irresistibly comic: they trudge through his books, absurd, cruel, creatures of inane placidity who see everything in the world as a mirror of their womanliness and who will speak sharply about something like Bolshevism as though it were an obvious minor nuisance, like mosquitoes or the common cold. I believe his woman producer also amused him because he finds the theatre inherently funny when it is earnest: something to do with its thickness, I think, compared with the fine mesh of the novels he likes.
When he taught in America he lectured on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Ulysses, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which was suggested by Edmund Wilson. The precise butterfly-pinner discovered that Tolstoy made the two families in Anna Karenina age on a different timescale, so that more years have passed for one than for another. He also says that Joyce left out any reference to Bloom’s coming back from the cemetery. “I know Dublin exactly. I could draw a map of it. I know the Liffey like the Moskva. I have never been to Dublin but I know it as well as Moscow. Also, I have never been to Moscow.”
He and his wife both lived in St. Petersburg, but they met first in Berlin in exile. They could have met many times when they were children; at dancing class, perhaps; it bothers them and they go over it.
“Véra’s coming down in a moment,” he said. “She’s lost something. A jacket, I think. When she loses things, it is always something very big.” He started to shake again. His sense of humor is very Russian, and the sight of its taking him over is hugely pleasurable. There is a lot of the buffoon in it. He is one of the few people I have seen who literally does sometimes nearly fall off his chair with laughing.
“Véra has been doing ‘cart horse’ as well,” he said. “Eventually she suggested ‘horse-cart.’ She hadn’t much hope.”
In the lounge there was an Edwardian mural of naked lovers, except that they were not naked and seemed to have nothing much to do with loving. The woman was vulgarly draped and the man wore, as well as a tulle scarf across his groin, a vapourish example of early Maidenform around his chest. After days of looking at the picture Nabokov still found it mildly interesting. It happened to be a rather obvious demonstration of the intimacy in art between silliness and prudery. The high-flying philistinism of protected art tastes strikes him often as richly foolish. Long ago the Empress of Russia gave him pleasure by being an eager admirer of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Invitation to a Beheading, one of his early Russian-language novels, has a sulphurous passage about an imaginary book considered to be “the acme of modern thought” in which world history is seen from the point of view of an elderly and apparently sagacious oak tree. Nabokov detests literature that has sweeping social pretentions. He also loathes prurience. The bad art of the past that has lost its power to bamboozle will often reveal that a large share of its badness consists in failing to go too far, which is the only course that is ever far enough in aesthetics. The streak of blue nerve in Nabokov’s work is part of its quality. It has an effect that is close to the exhilaration of flair and courage in real conduct.
In the actual world, the vice for which Nabokov seems to have most loathing is brutality. He finds it in tank-shaped political bullies, “swinetoned radio music,” the enjoyment of trained animals, the truisms of Freudianism, the abhorrence of Germany between the wars. (There is a German in one of his books who believes that “electrocution” is the root of “cute.”) In the world of art his equivalent loathing is for mediocrity, which is perhaps only the aesthetic form of the same brutality. There are celebrated writers in whom he detects a naïveté that he obviously finds almost thuggish. He detests Zola, Stendhal, Balzac, Thomas Mann.
Nabokov spoke eagerly about the descriptions of the fish in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and about the jungle passages and close physical descriptions in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. “The avant-garde French novels that I’ve read don’t stir my artistic appetite. Only here and there. Even Shaw can do that.” I asked him about Genet: “An interesting fairyland with good measurements.” Ostrovsky, the Russian playwright, he described
as having “a streak of poetry that he unfortunately put down because he was so intent on writing about the merchant class.” Tin-eared translators torment him. “Vive le pédant,” he writes defiantly in one of his prefaces, “and down with the simpletons who think that all is well if the spirit is rendered (while the words go away by themselves on a naïve and vulgar spree—in the suburbs of Moscow for instance—and Shakespeare is again reduced to play the king’s ghost).”
The English translations of his Russian novels have been done by Nabokov himself, generally with his son, Dmitri, who is a racing driver and a singer. Nabokov has just finished doing a Russian translation of Lolita, typeset in New York. “To be smuggled in, dropped by parachute, floating down on the blurb.” His attachment to words is urgent and moving. A copy of the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary is carried about in the back of Nabokov’s Lancia; in his hotel room on holiday it was opened among the M’s, halfway through, which is the way he leaves it so as to save the spine. In his autobiography he speaks of turning even now to the last page of any new grammar to find “that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean.”
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 14