Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

  HG: Is there anything you would care to say about the collaboration your wife has given you?

  VN: She presided as adviser and judge over the making of my first fiction in the early twenties. I have read to her all my stories and novels at least twice; and she has reread them all when typing them and correcting proofs and checking translations into several languages. One day in 1950, at Ithaca, New York, she was responsible for stopping me and urging delay and second thoughts as, beset with technical difficulties and doubts, I was carrying the first chapters of Lolita to the garden incinerator.

  HG: What is your relation to the translations of your books?

  VN: In the case of languages my wife and I know or can read—English, Russian, French, and to a certain extent German and Italian—the system is a strict checking of every sentence. In the case of Japanese or Turkish versions, I try not to imagine the disasters that probably bespatter every page.

  HG: What are your plans for future work?

  VN: I am writing a new novel, but of this I cannot speak. Another project I have been nursing for some time is the publication of the complete screenplay of Lolita that I made for Kubrick. Although there are just enough borrowings from it in his version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the film is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its original form.

  HG: If you had the choice of one and only one book by which you would be remembered, which one would it be?

  VN: The one I am writing or rather dreaming of writing. Actually, I shall be remembered by Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin.

  HG: Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?

  VN: The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but it is true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain Jeep.

  HG: What do you think about the contemporary competitive ranking of writers?

  VN: Yes, I have noticed that in this respect our professional book reviewers are veritable bookmakers. Who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an ageless international freak.

  HG: What is your great regret in your career?

  VN: That I did not come earlier to America. I would have liked to have lived in New York in the thirties. Had my Russian novels been translated then, they might have provided a shock and a lesson for pro-Soviet enthusiasts.

  HG: Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?

  VN: Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

  “To be Kind, to be Proud, to be Fearless”—Vladimir Nabokov in Conversation with James Mossman

  James Mossman / 1969

  From The Listener, October 23, 1969. © The Estate of James Mossman. Reprinted by permission.

  Vladimir Nabokov: I am a very poor speaker. I hope our audience won’t mind my using notes.

  James Mossman: What distinguishes us from animals?

  VN: Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species. All the rest follows: the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an ape’s memory and human memory is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum library.

  JM: As you recall a patch of time, its shapes, colors, and occupants, does this complete picture help combat time or offer any clue to its mysteries, or is it pleasure that it affords?

  VN: Let me quote a paragraph in my book Ada: “Physiologically the sense of Time is a sense of continuous becoming … Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong.” This is Van speaking, Van Veen, the charming villain of my book. I have not decided yet if I agree with him in all his views on the texture of time. I suspect I don’t.

  JM: You have written of yourself as looking out “from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time.” Why uninhabited?

  VN: Well, for the same reason that a desert island is a more deserving island than one with a footprint initialing its beach. Moreover, “uninhabited” makes direct sense here, since most of my former companions are gone.

  JM: Does the aristocrat in you despise the fictionist, or is it only English aristocrats who feel queasy about men of letters?

  VN: Pushkin, professional poet and Russian nobleman, used to shock the beau monde by declaring that he wrote for his own pleasure but published for the sake of money. I do likewise, but have never shocked anybody, except, perhaps, a former publisher of mine who used to counter my indignant requests by saying that I’m much too good a writer to need extravagant advances.

  JM: Have you ever experienced hallucinations or heard voices or had visions, and, if so, have they been illuminating?

  VN: When about to fall asleep after a good deal of writing or reading I often enjoy, if that is the right word, what some drug addicts experience: a continuous series of extraordinarily bright, fluidly changing pictures. Their type is different nightly, but on a given night it remains the same: one night it may be a banal kaleidoscope of endlessly recombined and reshaped stained-window designs; next time comes a subhuman or superhuman face with a formidably growing blue eye; or—and this is the most striking type—I see in realistic detail a long-dead friend turning toward me and melting into another remembered figure against the black velvet of my eyelid’s inner side. As to voices, I have described in Speak, Memory the snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my pillowed ear. Reports on those enigmatic phenomena can be found in the case-histories collected by psychiatrists, but no satisfying interpretation has come my way. Freudians keep out, please.

  JM: Is writing your novels pleasure or drudgery?

  VN: Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind; harrowing irritation when struggling with my tools and viscera—the pencil that needs re-sharpening, the word that I always misspell and have to look up. Then the labor of reading the typescript prepared by a secretary, the correction of my major mistakes and her minor ones, transferring corrections to other copies, misplacing pages, trying to remember something that had to be crossed out or inserted. Repeating the process when proofreading. Unpacking the radiant, beautiful, plump advance copy, opening it, and discovering a stupid oversight committed by me, allowed by me to survive. After a month or so I get used to the book’s final stage, to its having been weaned from my brain. I now regard it with a kind of amused tenderness, as a man regards, not his son, but the young wife of his son.

  JM: You say you are not interested in what critics say, yet you got very angry with Edmund Wilson for commenting on you.

  VN: I never
retaliate when my works of art are concerned. Here the arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my “self-assurance.” But I do reach for my heaviest dictionary when my scholarship is questioned, as was the case with my old friend Edmund Wilson, and I do get annoyed when people I have never met impinge on my privacy with false and vulgar assumptions—as, for example, Mr. Updike, who in an otherwise clever article absurdly suggests that my fictional character, bitchy and lewd Ada, is “in a dimension or two, Nabokov’s wife.”

  JM: Do you see yourself sometimes as Nabokov the writer isolated from others, a flaming sword to scourge them, an entertainer, a drudge, a genius—which?

  VN: The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart, geniy, is a term brimming with a sort of throaty awe and is used only in the case of a very small number of writers—Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy. To such deeply beloved authors as Turgenev and Chekhov, Russians assign the thinner term, talant—talent, not genius. It is a bizarre example of semantic discrepancy—the same word being more substantial in one language than in another. Although my Russian and my English are practically coeval, I still feel appalled and puzzled at seeing “genius” applied to any important storyteller, such as Maupassant or Maugham. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift—the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James.

  JM: Can political ideas solve any of the big problems of an individual life?

  VN: I have always marveled at the neatness of such solutions: ardent Stalinists transforming themselves into harmless socialists, socialists finding a sunset harbor in conservatism, and so forth. I suppose this must be rather like religious conversion of which I know very little. I can only explain God’s popularity by an atheist’s panic.

  JM: Great writers have had strong political and sociological ideas—Tolstoy was one. Does the presence of such ideas in his work make you think the less of him?

  VN: I go by books, not by authors. I consider Anna Karenina the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth century literature; it is closely followed by The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I detest Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy’s publicistic forays are unreadable. War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel written for that amorphic and limp creature known as “the general reader,” and more specifically, for the young. In terms of artistic structure, it does not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences with cool Prince Andrei turning up to witness this or that historical moment, this or that footnote in the sources used often uncritically by the author.

  JM: Why do you dislike writers who go in for soul-searching and self-revelations in print? After all, do you not do it at another remove, behind a thicket of art?

  VN: If you are alluding to Dostoyevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

  JM: Is your attachment to childhood specially nostalgic and intense because you were abruptly banished by the Russian Revolution from the place where it evolved?

  VN: Yes, that’s right. But the stress is not on the Russian Revolution. It could have been anything—an earthquake, an individual departure prompted by a private disaster. The accent is on the abruptness of the change.

  JM: Would you ever try to go back there?

  VN: There’s nothing to look at. New tenement houses and old churches do not interest me. The hotels there are terrible. I detest the Soviet theatre. Any palace in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the Czars. The village huts in the forbidden hinterland are as dismally poor as ever, and the wretched peasant flogs his wretched carthorse with the same wretched zest. As to my special northern landscape and the haunts of my childhood, well, I would not wish to spoil their images in my mind.

  JM: How would you define your alienation from present-day Russia?

  VN: I loathe and despise dictatorships.

  JM: You called the revolution there “trite.” Why?

  VN: Because it followed the banal historical pattern of bloodshed, deceit and oppression, because it betrayed the democratic dream, and because all it can promise the Soviet citizen is the material article, secondhand philistine values, imitation of Western foods and gadgets, and, of course, caviar for the decorated general.

  JM: Why do you live in hotels?

  VN: It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit—the habit of freedom.

  JM: Did you sit up to watch the Americans land on the Moon? Were you impressed?

  VN: “Impressed” is not the right word. Treating the soil of the Moon gives one, I imagine—or rather my projected self imagines—the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that, despite their awkward suits, the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange, sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, and of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, and of feeling in one’s spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand this thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?

  JM: You parody the poet W.H. Auden in your novel Ada, I think. Why do you think so little of him?

  VN: I do not parody Mr. Auden anywhere in Ada. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his poetry for that. I do know, however, a few of his translations, and deplore the blunders he so lightheartedly permits himself. Robert Lowell, of course, is the greatest offender.

  JM: Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a “tartine de merde” which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?

  VN: I’ve never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn’t he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.

  JM: Could you say how important your wife has been as a collaborator in your work?

  VN: No, I could not.

  JM: Does having a grown-up son help to make time less intolerable?

  VN: My son is exactly half my age now: half-time, with his turn to face the sun. He is an opera singer with a magnificent bass voice.

  JM: Which is the worst thing men do?

  VN: To stink, to cheat, to torture.

  JM: Which is the best?

  VN: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.

  Nabokov: A Portrait

  Alfred Appel Jr. / 1971

  From The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1971. © The Estate of Alfred Appel Jr. Reprinted by permission.

  They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay

  Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

  -W.B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”

  “I’m as American as apple pie,” said Vladimir Nabokov as we walked through the main lobby of the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. “You have a funny accent, Captain,” I drawled, imitating Peter Sellers’ impersonation of drunken and deranged Quilty being confronted by gun-toting Humbert Humbert in the film version of Lolita. Nabokov laughed, a full-bodied, very Russian laugh; his accent, however, is quite English, the language of his nursery and his university. He and his wife Véra have lived in the Montreux Palace since 1960. “Gogol began Dead Souls nearby, you know,” said Nabokov, “and Tolstoy stayed here and risked his health by chasing chambermaids down these endless halls.”<
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  Montreux, says Nabokov, is “a rosy place for our riparian exile.” Situated in the eastern corner of Lake Geneva, the little town is quiet save for the tourist season, when its main attraction is Byron’s Castle of Chillon. “Our Alp,” as Nabokov calls it, is visible from their window. The rococo Palace Hotel, erected in 1835, resembles the grand hotels at which Nabokov’s family vacationed during his privileged childhood. There are personal and practical reasons, he says, for their staying there now; his sister, Elena, lives nearby in Geneva; their son, Dmitri, an opera singer, resides in Milan; and one of Nabokov’s current works-in-progress, an illustrated history of the butterfly in art, “from Egyptian antiquity to the Renaissance,” calls for research trips to various European museums. Montreux is not lonely, however, or without its social life. “There are the crested grebes of Lake Geneva,” he says, “and we are always happy to see American intellectuals.”