Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  He is now permanently an American, living in Switzerland on a merely temporary basis. He may dream of Russia, the spires and summer hazes of his childhood, but his heart is in Ithaca or Wyoming or Columbus or someplace. He admits that he is “not emotionally involved with Indian dances or pumpkin pie on a spiritual plane,” but adds, “I am as American as April in Arizona.”

  Nabokov’s main characteristic as a social person is a relaxed, detached affability. He likes jokes, particularly his own. He also can be impatient and sometimes brutal. A well-known writer tells of meeting Nabokov at a party and blurting out, “I love your book Lolita.” Tall, twinkling, grave Nabokov gave him a cold eye and turned on his heel. Something in the tone had displeased him. He has said, “I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations. I’m a mild old gentleman. I’m very kind.”

  He telephoned mornings around nine o’clock, when his early writing was done, to make plans for our meetings that day—a swim, a walk, lunch, dinner. In the garden we talked about moths and butterflies. He is an expert on butterflies, not moths, he said. Adding an observation—“Did you know that the hawk moth can fly two or three hundred miles an hour? This was discovered by an airplane pilot who found the moths outdistancing him. He thought he was perhaps standing still or flying backwards.”

  He is a severe judge of other writers. A few years ago the names of Dostoyevsky, Freud, Thomas Mann, or Pasternak stimulated something like rage. They were interested in “ideas,” “moral judgments,” “doing good”; they were religious or they claimed to know something or they flattered the vulgar tastes of the half-educated and the theory-bound. Now it seemed that his contempt for them was adulterated with a small portion of the milk of human kindness. But this did not indicate any softening of the polemical spirit. During our six days of conversation he expressed fury at mistranslation, “creative” translation, doctors, Bolsheviks, critics of America. He looked younger and stronger than in 1958. Though he mentions neuralgia, insomnia and various other ills, he looks like a powerful middle-aged man, and his years are carried with elephantine grace.

  He is planning a book of studies of Joyce, Proust and other writers.

  He has a novel well under way, secreting it on his index cards and letting it grow. The central section is finished, he says.

  He is still working on butterflies. He supervises translations of his work. He attends to his business.

  There is a folk proverb which states: Behind every successful man there stands a surprised woman. Well, this is not true of Mrs. Nabokov. She is a calm, serious, and protective guardian of her husband’s gifts; and not surprised. Clearly she has always believed utterly in his genius. She writes his letters, drives his car (he doesn’t drive), criticizes his manuscripts, arranges his business matters, and signs hotel registers for them both (he does not give autographs). There is one lifelong friend to whom he occasionally writes a postcard. He is relaxed and easy, knowing that the way has been cleared for him. Occasionally she censors his conversation or interrupts an off-color story, but her steady regard expresses unshakeable approval of her husband.

  Together they sometimes visit their thirty-two-year old son Dmitri, operatic bass and part-time racing driver, a tall, good-looking young man who has also translated some of his father’s work from Russian into English. They keep a room for him in their set of suites at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They showed me an old passport photograph of Véra Nabokov with their child—an angelic little boy and a beautiful young woman with fine eyes and a strong, straight nose, traveling on French papers through the perils of Hitlerian Europe. Véra Nabokov does not like off-color jokes or jokes about Jews. She is Jewish, and one of the few social ills which seems to trouble this Russian aristocrat is racial or religious prejudice.

  We stroll in the garden. Nabokov still recalls, with a lopsided grin, how he arrived at the scene of his father’s murder just a few minutes after it happened. Smoke, confusion, horror. His father lay dead. An acquaintance with a flesh wound in the arm stopped him and wailed, “I was hurt too.” This event, forty-five years gone now, made him rumble and hesitate as we paced on the shores of Lake Geneva. He commented on the man who showed his minor wound to a boy seeing his dead father: “He was a good man, not insensitive, just excited.”

  And the murderer? He was later employed by the Nazis, put in charge of Russian émigré affairs.

  One of Nabokov’s brothers was killed by the Germans in a concentration camp. He died of “inanition.” The word fascinated him—“inanition.” He has written about this brother in the recent revision of Speak, Memory.

  Nabokov’s books are melodramatic, filled with fantasies of violence and torture. He has lived with both the fantasies and the realities. Now, as they have been assimilated to his ironic, paradoxical mind, he is at peace with the demons. He almost enjoys their company. He has made his treaty with trouble, his own and history’s.

  Nabokov suffered all the usual childhood diseases, including the desire to write. He wanted to organize the strangeness of the world by the standards of words and classifications, poetry and arrangements of butterflies. He wanted to live by these measures and stylizations. He still makes up his own truths and is bewildered by the reluctance of others to see as clearly as he does. Sometimes Nabokov seems to have the quality he ascribes to Gogol: that of thoroughly planning his works after he has written and published them. But this after-the-fact reasoning is just as stubborn as the more usual kind of development. And Nabokov does not bother to explain his work; he knows, and demands that the reader know.

  Here is how he describes the growth of a story by Gogol: “Mumble, mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the chaos from which they all derived.” This is also the fantastic way Nabokov’s stories accumulate onto his magically shuffled index cards. And as he says of Gogol, he aims toward an appeal “to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”

  When The Gift, one of Nabokov’s early Russian novels, appeared in English, I noticed that one “Michael Scammell” was named as the translator. Never having heard of Michael Scammell, and being familiar with Nabokov’s earnest playfulness, I decided that this was another of the master’s hoaxes. Examining the name “Scammell,” I derived a near anagram, Le Masc, which becomes Le Masque, which becomes, clearly, the Mask, for Nabokov. And so I wrote to accuse him of this ghostly behavior. My suspicions were confirmed by the sweet and evasive reply from Véra Nabokov: “My husband wishes to thank you for your recent very interesting communication …”

  Epilogue to this story: It turns out that there really is a translator named Michael Scammell, though the Nabokov’s did not find it necessary to disappoint me in my little discovery. This is an example of life turning into a Nabokov satire, Russian boxes within boxes, a phantom beckoning the pedantic friend into his hall of errors.

  Each day we strolled in the dappled sunlight, avoiding the Swiss wet damp. He leaned forward with a scout’s intensity to name and admire moths and butterflies. I noticed after a few days with him that I too saw butterflies everywhere. He destroyed thick headed critics and fake scholars. He asked who else besides him supports the President’s policy in Vietnam. I told him that quite a few people do, according to the polls. With smiling generosity he tipped the waiters who brought us beer, orange squash, ice cream.

  He reported that one night he dreamed a scene which he then wrote down and promptly afterward saw on Swiss television. He is sure that this is not clairvoyance or telepathy or any variety of seeing into the future; rather, it is remembering the future. Time does not move forward, tock tock tock, like the hand of a clock, he said.

  We went into the Chambre de Débarras, the Room of Disorder, to see some of his stored books and materials—a Turkish translation of Lolita, tennis rackets, mountain cl
imbing equipment, photographs, and a little American flag tilted at a crazy angle above the washbasin. “You recognize that?” he asked. “I love America,” he said, “a great country.” He is opposed to racial discrimination, but otherwise, as he says, “I approve of everything.” He describes the American government as one of his “hobbies.”

  Now we spoke again about his conception of time, which is somewhat different from anyone else’s. How to hold the instant without an object, without peopling it? He puzzles. The problems of Time contain the other great problems, Soul, Mortality, Art, a sense of life on earth. He has entitled a section of the novel he is writing “The Texture of Time.”

  Pause. He interrupts this train of thought to comment with a pleasant, mildly suffering sigh that a German television crew is coming to do him. Shake of heavy, much-imposed-upon head. Another sigh. He wonders why I don’t ask more questions. “Ask some questions,” he orders.

  Taking my assigned role of Nabokov character (journalist, impertinent young fellow, poking around), I asked him about the movie of Lolita. Answer: He is a friend of James Mason’s but never became a friend of Sue Lyon’s. I decided to slip into the role of another Nabokov character (scholar, impertinent middle-aged fellow, poking around). We spoke of clairvoyance once more. Prophecy is the wit of the fool. He makes the judgment with a certain fierceness. No doubt it is connected with his notion of simultaneity, of Nabokovian time and of the irrelevance of most human projects. Intelligence is much too important to bother with such trivial matters as predicting the future.

  The controversy buzzing around Nabokov’s ambiguously affable head has not been calmed, despite his fame. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy called Pale Fire, his last novel written in English, one of the great works of the twentieth century. But this strange tale of a New England scholar who may also be an exiled king, all cast in the form of a learned commentary on a long poem, represented yet another set of Russian boxes within boxes: a satire of a pastoral epic? A real pastoral epic? A parody of the pedant’s habits? A parable about exile and isolation? The book was greeted by many of Nabokov’s admirers with the sort of disarray which greeted James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. After we had grown accustomed to the elegant comic epic of Lolita, and the benign and touching bumbler Pnin, and the ironies and puns and the mad, pathetic, obsessed, nostalgic, and yet coherent monsters of so many other stories, what was this trickster genius doing in Pale Fire, what was this “crossword puzzle,” as one flustered critic called it? Was he just putting everyone on, as some admirers insisted, or had he written, as others claimed, the ultimate novel?

  And then there is his translation and commentary on the masterpiece of Russian poetry, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. How is it possible that his old friend, Edmund Wilson, the dean of American criticism, can denounce him as a quirky and even incompetent translator? Surely their continuing bitter public controversy reads like a Nabokov novel—in fact, a little like Pale Fire. Who is who in this drama? After all, it is Nabokov who is a native Russian and Wilson who is mainly self-taught in the language. Can it be that Nabokov, who used to help Wilson with his grammar, has somehow lost his grip on his native language, and Wilson, the scholar from New England, can lecture him about the tenses of Russian verbs? … But again, we are in the worlds of Kinbote and John Shade, the shadowy fantasts of Pale Fire, dreaming of “Zembla, a distant northern land,” where truth is really truth and reality can be defined.

  May I now attempt a partial summary of the character and gifts of this triumphantly lonely spirit? (Forgive me, friend far away in Montreux, if I sound like still another impertinent ghost from one of your novels.) No, comes the answer, as sure as my real name is V. Sirin. Or rather, his answer would be: Irrelevant, foolish, like a German TV crew, like a moralist or a censor, like a true believer or a false believer.

  Nevertheless …

  Humor, an organized life and steady service by his brain helped Nabokov to keep his mysteries, his reserve, his private turf. If he doesn’t understand the meaning of human life—most men don’t—he at least knows what sort of map he has to the unknown country, and keeps in good repair his equipment for exploration and his sense of the treasure to be sought. “I travel through life in a space helmet.” He does not get too close to earth; he does not judge or interpret a world. Rather, he finds and makes his own world, and makes himself the compassionate, ironic, horrified master in this made-up universe. He is absolutely self-confident. After navigating odder and harder paths than those which normally lie before a man, he has now gotten straight with himself. He has no need to fear putting on the wrong mask. He always has the right mask for himself and for others. Embarrassment exists only in the past, though the past endures.

  “I would like to say something about time. The past is gone, the future is not here yet, and the present is slipping away at every instant—what is Time?” The gravity in his face is rare; he is allowing a part of the iceberg of his real thought to come to the surface. Once more he begins to speak of a dream in which he remembered something that had not yet occurred; he does not call it prediction, but memory of the future. This is not a joke to him. He notes that the blank abyss on one side of our lives—death—seems to frighten us more than the equally blank emptiness on the other side, when the world was there without us and the baby carriage sat empty in the photograph of the pregnant mother.

  Capable of immediate tenderness and warmth, Nabokov is deeply suspicious of the human possibility of goodness. Discussion of it quickly becomes, he intimates, “poshlosty.” (“Postlust” is a Russian word which he defines as “vile vulgarity.”) He has no illusions. He has built his spaceship and he travels through life protected by it, secure in the knowledge that when he walks out of it into space he can walk back, and if he cannot, well, that was an amusing risk he was taking. Only an “S,” as he says, makes the difference between “cosmic” and “comic.”

  Near the hour of goodbyes we spoke about the future of this man who has lived in hotels or taken rented lodgings ever since the Russian revolution. He insists on his American character despite his grand exile, like a Russian aristocrat’s, in Switzerland. He would like to live in Boston, New York or California. But his wife doesn’t like the Boston weather, and the summers are very hot in New York, and California is very far away, though there are some good butterflies nearby. And their son is studying music again in Milan. And so, while waiting to find a permanent home, this odd genius camps out in a hotel in Montreux, with boxes stored in Ithaca, with relics spread all over the world, writing on his index cards, planning out his terrible plans, secreting his criticisms, polemics, poems, stories, novels, autobiography. To our great good fortune he both explains and conceals himself with great skill.

  So let us not examine him or his life too closely. Perhaps we should even avoid the flood of dissertations which will soon engulf his privacy. Just ride with the rhythm of his spirit. Let it glow.

  As a farewell gift, Véra Nabokov gave me the bulletin of the Anti-Vivisection League. Certain passages were underlined. I am sure there was a reason for this, but I lost it on the plane from Geneva, Switzerland, to Cleveland, Ohio.

  An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

  Alfred Appel Jr. / 1967

  From Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8.2 (1967): 127–153 © 1967 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

  Alfred Appel Jr.: For years bibliographers and literary journalists didn’t know whether to group you under “Russian” or “American.” Now that you’re living in Switzerland there seems to be complete agreement that you’re American. Do you find this kind of distinction at all important regarding your identity as a writer?

  Vladimir Nabokov: I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The more distinctive an insect’s aspect, the less apt is the taxonomist to glance first of all at the locality label under t
he pinned specimen in order to decide which of several vaguely described races it should be assigned to. The writer’s art is his real passport. His identity should be immediately recognized by a special pattern or unique coloration. His habitat may confirm the correctness of the determination but should not lead to it. Locality labels are known to have been faked by unscrupulous insect dealers. Apart from these considerations, I think of myself today as an American writer who has once been a Russian one.

  AA: The Russian writers you have translated and written about all precede the so-called “age of realism,” which is more celebrated by English and American readers than is the earlier period. Would you say something about your temperamental or artistic affinities with the great writers of the 1830–40 era of masterpieces? Do you see your own work falling under such general rubrics as a tradition of Russian humor?

  VN: The question of the affinities I may think I have or not have with nineteenth century Russian writers is a classificational, not a confessional matter. There is hardly a single Russian major writer of the past whom pigeonholers have not mentioned in connection with me. Pushkin’s blood runs through the veins of modern Russian literature as inevitably as Shakespeare’s through those of English literature.

  AA: Many of the major Russian writers, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Bely, have distinguished themselves in both poetry and prose, an uncommon accomplishment in English and American literature. Does this signal fact have anything to do with the special nature of Russian literary culture, or are there technical or linguistic resources which make this kind of versatility more possible in Russian? And as a writer of both prose and poetry, what distinctions do you make between them?