“In Massachusetts once I was ill with food poisoning,” he said. “I was being wheeled along a corridor. They left the trolley by a bookcase and I drew out a big medical dictionary and in the ward I drew the curtains around myself and read. It wasn’t allowed because it looked as if I were dying. They took the book away. In hospitals there is still something of the eighteenth century madhouse.”
“Pasternak?” I asked. At once he talked very fast. “Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors, there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: What is that line, Véra? ‘To be a woman is a big step.’ It is ridiculous.” He laughed and looked stricken.
“This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow. There was the liberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon because it had almost been broken by handshakes.
“Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping, for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they gave her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously, Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her. He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy, in one of his novels, gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.
“And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say ‘as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel,’” he said, looking out at the rain. “It would be a beautiful metaphor. But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.
“As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example.” His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation. “What he has turned it into in Russian is this: ‘All covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.’ You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?”
“Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?”
“Yes. ‘Keeps wiping the pig-iron!’” He expostulated and looked genuinely angry. “Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.”
“Isn’t that what happened to Pushkin?” said Véra.
“He had translated the French writers of his day. The small coin of drawing-room poets and the slightly larger coin of Racine. In Russian it became breathtaking.” I remarked that someone had once said to me that the first man who compared a woman to a flower was a genius and the second, a fool. “And the third, a knave,” said Nabokov.
We went for a drive in the new Lancia through the mountains. Mrs. Nabokov drove, rather fast, mostly in third gear on a tricky road, in the face of jibes from her husband about the sheer drops that she had chosen on other days as suitable places to turn.
“Sometimes my son wishes I wouldn’t joke so much,” he said with melancholy.
I sat on the backseat, which was still insulated in cellophane, and took off my shoes to keep the cover intact. A hat for butterfly-hunting and walks was on the back shelf.
“You could cover your toes with my hat,” said Mr. Nabokov.
He looked for good meadows for butterfly-hunting and memorized promising paths off the road. His feeling about nature is communicable even to people who don’t share it. He is the only man I have ever heard who responds to mention of Los Angeles not with abuse of the city but with glory in the vegetation. He wrote once that when he hunted butterflies it was his highest experience of timelessness, a way “to picket nature” and “to rebel against the void fore and aft.” I think it is also an expression of the great writer’s passion to define.
We had lemon tea and cream cakes in another hotel looking out across the mountains. He was charming to a waitress who had seemed not to have heard the order and said peacefully after a long wait: “I can tell by the nape of her neck that the cakes are coming.” He has a comic affection for girls’ bodies that is rather like his tenderness for gaffes, as though the naked toes or napes of girls absorbed by other things fall unknowingly into a category of farcical and touching blunders.
I asked him whether Lolita would have turned into a boy if his own real child had been a girl.
“Oh, yes,” he said at once. “If I had had a daughter, Humbert Humbert would have been a pederast.”
I thought perhaps that he might cherish a little hatred for Lolita now, as writers often do for books that have had more attention than anything else they have written, but his feelings seem not to have swerved. The book remains his favorite, though he says that Pale Fire was more difficult to write.
“I had written a short story with the same idea as Lolita. The man’s name there is Arthur. They travel through France. I never published it. The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality. I was on my way to the incinerator one day with half the manuscript to burn it, and Véra said wait a minute. And I came back meekly.”
“I don’t remember that. Did I?” said Mrs. Nabokov.
“What was most difficult was putting myself … I am a normal man, you see. I traveled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls. I went to school on the pretext of placing our daughter. We have no daughter. For Lolita, I took one arm of a little girl who used to come to see Dmitri, one kneecap of another.
He says in the preface that the book originated in a story in Paris-Soir of an ape that had been taught to draw: Its first drawing was of the bars of its cage. The brawl around Lolita and the fierce humor that stylizes all of his work often seems to obscure the extreme tenderness that impels it. His sensitivity to suffering and the exploited makes the attention paid to the plot facts of Lolita seem even more brutishly literal-minded than usual. When he was in Hollywood to do the script, the producers asked him to make Lolita and Humbert Humbert get married: Apparently, this would have pulled some knot of embarrassment for them. The idea of the book being classified as obscene—as it still is in Burma, for instance—is much more gross than anything in most pornography, for it is a book that extends exceptional gentleness to the yearning and the out of step. Elsewhere, in his Laughter in the Dark, a murderer thinks “impossible to kill while she was taking off her shoe”; it is a modern equivalent of the moment in Hamlet when a man cannot be murdered at prayer. In Nabokov’s work sexuality stands for tenderness, and tenderness is the remaining sanctity.
In the car again, I asked him about something he had once written about the author of Alice in Wonderland.
“I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” he said, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls? He would make arrangements with aunts and mothers to take the children out. He was never caught, except by one girl who wrote abou
t him when she was much older.
He started to answer something I was saying, and turned it into an imitation of Edmund Wilson saying, “Yes, yes.” Nabokov and Edmund Wilson are old friends, but they have recently conducted a waspish public fight about Mr. Wilson’s knowledge of Russian, involving claims that seem fairly foolish in the face of a Russian-speaker. Nabokov’s private feelings seem affectionately caustic. The imitated “Yes” involved a head movement like a man trying to get down a pill when he is gagging on it. “Apparently, consent with him is so difficult he must make a convulsive effort,” said Nabokov warmly enough, and came back to Lolita.
“It was a great pleasure to write, but it was also very painful. I had to read so many case histories. Most of it was written in a car to have complete quiet.” He says in Speak, Memory that “in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and world.” This is the force of Lolita. The most unsparing love novel of our literature of glib and easy sex is about an obsession that is locally criminal, written by an alien attacking the numbness of a culture from the inside of the machine that best represents its numbness.
The Artist in Pursuit of Butterflies
Herbert Gold / 1967
From The Saturday Evening Post, February 11, 1967. © Herbert Gold, novelist and essayist. Reprinted by permission.
On the shore of Lake Geneva at Montreux, in an immense aging luxury hotel out of another time—all cuckoo-clock carved wood and space and silent, gliding service—lives Vladimir Nabokov, a sixty-eight-year old man with a booming laugh, who loves his wife, his son, and the interior landscape of his own mind. He enjoys good wines, good food, good company, but goes to bed early, since he rises at six A.M. He has a passion for butterflies and spends long periods chasing uphill and down dale with net and wife. In fact, he is a distinguished lepidopterist, but he is famous for another vocation.
More than a decade ago this reclusive White Russian émigré, who was then teaching literature at Cornell University, listened carefully to the speech of children on school buses, explored the spaces of America during vacation butterfly-collecting trips, marveled over the social complexities of the motel and composed an odyssey of the doomed love of the middle-aged Humbert Humbert for the adolescent Lolita Haze. Rejected by several American publishers, he finally sent the manuscript off to Paris, where it was published in 1955 by the Olympia Press. Admirers began importing the book, but American editors remained skittish. “I love it,” said one of them. “It’s a great book. Nabokov is a great writer. But I can’t print it—you think I’m crazy?” Nevertheless, Lolita was finally published in the United States in 1958, and despite a few hostile reviews, the book earned an immense critical and popular success. And for good reasons. Lolita is a definitive guide to American roadside culture, and also a picture of the evolving teenager, and a metaphor for the eternal quest for innocence, and a case history of abnormal psychology, and an exercise of comic style and picaresque form and many other things besides—in short, a totally original work with the rough, undefined edges and mysteries of a masterpiece.
Through the curious fate of his darling “nymphet,” who became both a household word and a movie, her author sustained an odd transmogrification. At last he is given his due as an authentic living master of the novel form, a great man of letters and also namer of the meat patties served at a San Francisco drive-in—“Lolitaburgers.” He has made his mark at many levels.
Lolita aside, Vladimir Nabokov is a unique and remarkable party. He is presently supervising the translation of his early novels from Russian into English. He is planning the publication of his collected papers in lepidopterology. His particular specialty is the classification of butterflies; he has written twenty important articles; he still makes field trips; he has discovered and named several new species. As a man of many cultures, he has written eloquently about the problems of translation, and taken upon himself such duties as translation of the great Russian poet Pushkin into English and Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He moves from the creation of an immense zoo of jealous, nostalgic, obsessed, maddened wanderers and sticks-in-the-mud—in several collections of stories and poems, in some thirteen novels, in plays, in biographies, in his autobiography and his revision of his autobiography—toward the gradual revelation of an absolutely unique, perhaps both frightening and touching personality.
Does Vladimir Nabokov live, like others, in a world he never made? No, having suffered greater troubles than most, he has no pity for himself. He lives in a world he is continually remaking. “I travel through life in a space helmet,” he says, roaring with laughter.
I was thinking to myself: Here I am in Europe—now what? I had arrived by ship, plane, train, and taxi on a hot day of Indian Summer. I checked in at that grand relic, the Montreux Palace, where Mrs. Nabokov had made a reservation for me, and decided to cool off in the pool before making contact with my friends. I was thinking, in the sight of these mountains and this lake where so many aristocratic Russians had taken the waters and the airs, of the irony of the cosmopolitan Nabokov finally bringing his intelligence, his humor, his nostalgia, his defiance, his art and his self to this traditional spa. While leaving thirty-five boxes of goods with Dean’s Storage in Ithaca, New York. While leaving his childhood in Russia, his adolescence and early youth in Berlin and Paris, his young manhood in Cambridge (England and Massachusetts) and his fruitful middle years in Ithaca. And yet he knows who he is. The poet is a man with a child’s needs and judgments. For Nabokov to remain a live poet, squalling and brawling, there had to be irony in his system. And steel. And Véra Nabokov watching over him.
I slumped into a beach chair for a bit of friendly, cross-culture study of the French, German, and Swiss poolside mini-flirts, and suddenly there were Véra and Vladimir Nabokov, bared to the sun, in lively conversation with some friends. Nabokov caught sight of me, seemed puzzled for a moment, and then burst into that deep, rich, Russian laughter. He accused me of dropping by parachute from the heavens. I was a secret agent. He had expected to meet a later train from Paris. There was jovial banter about the eight years passed since last we had met. How well I looked! How fit! How marvelously fit! But then the thoughtful Nabokov swerved: “You were a bit fattish, I think, last time.”
One of our first occupations was for Nabokov to deny the truth of anecdotes which I had been telling about him since we had first known each other in 1958. For example, although he recalls his dislike of Pasternak’s novel, he believes he never referred to it as “Doctor Van Cliburn.” I did not check, for fear it might be denied, a conversation about a mutual friend. “Of course,” said Nabokov, “he is a very nice fellow. Of course, do not lend him any money. Of course, he is completely untalented. Of course, he is a liar and a hypocrite. Of course, he is a pederast. Of course, isn’t that good you know him, he’s a very nice fellow.” But of course that was 1958, and I am quoting from memory, and Nabokov distrusts everyone’s memory except his own. “You would like another orange squash?” he asked now.
He claims among his ancestors the first cave man who painted a mammoth, a medieval Tartar prince, a long line of German barons, an obscure Crusader, a well-known composer, the first President of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine, a Minister of Justice. His father was a noted liberal statesman, jurist and writer. Reading legal commentaries by his father, published over seventy years ago, he finds an eloquent denunciation of “crimes against young and tender girls by older men.” Curious, he says. Lolita, he remarks dreamily. He likes to feel he is continuing a tradition.
He smiles at the thought that he is an avant-garde writer whose first work was printed more than fifty years ago. It was a pamphlet of poems and the place was St. Petersburg, and, in 1914, the poet was aged fifteen. His faraway childhood was rich in marvels. He learned English before he learned to read Russian. He also learned French. “I was a perfectly normal trilingual child,” he says. He played chess, collected butterflies, loved soccer. After inherit
ing about two million dollars (“a lot of money in those days”) and promptly losing it all in the revolution (a perfectly ordinary thing in those days), he studied at Cambridge, England, and then wrote in Russian in Berlin and Paris. The infusion of languages and cultures continued. He received about five dollars for his translation of Alice in Wonderland. He precariously survived by teaching boxing, tennis, languages, and by making the first Russian crossword puzzles. He wrote plays, poetry, novels. He was a part-time journalist. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he mentions a poor disappeared Russian émigré talent, V. Sirin, who is the writer of the period between the two wars whom he found most touching. V. Sirin was the pen name of Vladimir Nabokov.
There was the melodramatic shock—so like the events in his novels—of his father’s murder. His father, a liberal, was killed at a meeting in Berlin by a fanatical Czarist who was aiming at someone else. Nabokov’s father had thrown himself on one of the assassins when the other pumped bullets into him.
He fled the Nazis. He fled the communists. He fled the embittered White Russian fanatics. He married, he had a son, he wandered the face of Europe on a sickly refugee passport. He scrambled a step ahead of pauperdom. A life on continual beginnings and new starts, exiles and comebacks, except that he has never, despite several official invitations, gone back to Russia.
Arriving in the United States as Europe sank into war, he took up an academic career at Wellesley, where he taught Russian; at Harvard, where he did research in lepidopterology; and at Cornell, where he lectured on literature. He was hard on both students and colleagues and took a special delight in tormenting deans and administrators. Because he disliked department heads in particular, plus departments in general, he was made his own private department, given his courses, and assigned a Chairman of Nabokov to take care of paperwork. This was not so bad, he says with satisfaction. That’s the way things ought to be.
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 15