Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  “My assistant,” he always called her, with a decorous, businesslike impersonality, but everyone knew she was Véra Nabokov. Depending on the lecture room, she would sit either in the first row or at the end of the platform, her cool, steady gaze taking in the audience, one by one, it seemed. “My assistant has forgotten one label on the diagram … oh, it is a very important label,” he said one day, rushing to the blackboard and picking up a piece of chalk. It was the only time anyone had seen her smile in class, even at one of his jokes, or, rather, especially at one of those jokes, since most of his funniest “asides” were in script, and, an experienced trouper, she had heard it all before, many times, and had no doubt typed it up. A woman of great dignity and natural elegance, Véra Nabokov has been a totally devoted collaborator, handling her husband’s correspondence and business transactions, driving the car, grading thousands of examination papers, and running the household, such as it was. Fiercely intelligent, she is at once his ideal reader and only real editor. Since their marriage in Berlin in 1925, he has read to her all of his works at least twice, and she has reread them while typing them; Ada was the first manuscript to have been prepared by a professional secretary.

  “Véra’s Russian is stupendous,” he says, and she learned Italian in order to be able to check the translations of his novels into that tongue. She reads widely in several languages and is very much “up” on contemporary American letters. “He has digested his Nabokov,” she says of a well-known young novelist, genus Black Humor. “Trash,” she says of another. Her memory may be better than her husband’s. He does not remember Thomas Pynchon, a student in Literature 311–312, circa 1957, nor has he read V. (“Lovely title, lovely,” says Nabokov), but she quickly responds, “Yes, I remember him, he had an unusual handwriting: half printing, half script.” Nor is Véra Nabokov too shy to disagree with her husband, and their games of Scrabble (in English, and “Skrebl” in Russian) have the aura of an infinite series of good-natured rematches between Dempsey and Tunney. Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two.

  Although he taught at major institutions, published in Partisan Review as well as The New Yorker, and had friends such as Edmund Wilson and Harvard’s Harry Levin, Nabokov remained through his years at Cornell aloof from “literary circles” and naively unaware of their existence. One summer in the forties he taught at a writer’s conference at the University of Salt Lake City. He remembers that the faculty included Wallace Stegner, Oscar Williams, and another man. “I don’t remember his name,” he says. “White-haired, eyeglasses, he wore a conservative suit and looked like a banker, yet wrote some extraordinary verse: ‘Bells … Bells’—not Poe!—‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,’ I liked particularly.” The mystery faculty member was John Crowe Ransom, at that time one of the two or three most influential poet-critics in America and editor of the Kenyon Review. A well-known younger poet of that period who died in middle age sat next to Nabokov on a bus trip after they had both given readings. “He didn’t want to talk about poetry,” says Nabokov. “Only about the reputations of other poets.” Nabokov also remembers how a distinguished professor of English at Cornell cut short a budding literary discussion at a cocktail party: “It’s after five; no shop talk!” Nabokov laughs. “A strange man,” he adds. But it is with no bemusement that he recalls the expert in linguistics who could not speak the language of the department he chaired, a phenomenon preserved in the pages of Pnin. Many of the most fantastic and grotesque perversions of learning in Pnin happen to be drawn from “real life” in the academy; it is the only novel he has ever written that bears the disclaimer, “All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

  Never once during his almost twenty years on campus did Nabokov write an academic article or attend a meeting of the Modern Language Association, but he did contribute continually to Psyche and other lepidopterological journals, and occasionally participated in scientific meetings. Once, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York where several of Nabokov’s specimens are deposited, he met a rather stuffy old gentleman, a banker or businessman, who told Nabokov that he had recently caught a unique butterfly. As Nabokov recreates the scene in the museum, the man, eyes aglow, reached into his vest pocket and produced a little tin specimen box. He opened the box and, playing it close to the vest in the most literal sense of that cliché, he held it in his cupped palm, against his ample stomach, like a vendor of pornographic postcards in front of a church or school yard. Nabokov mimes his manner, and impersonating himself, leans over to see the proffered butterfly. Stolid and staid, the old gentleman had also experienced the quiet rapture of discovering an undescribed species, and like a long line of Nabokov’s fictional creations, from Luzhin in The Defense to Humbert in Lolita, he too had pursued a secret life, an ardent desire, an obsessive quest.

  Nabokov went butterfly-hunting every summer, and these adventures as a “lepist” carried him through two hundred motel rooms in forty-six states, along the same roads traveled by Humbert and Lolita. Though he had tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs continued to rent, moving every year, sometimes every term—a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s only close friend at Cornell, remembers visiting them after they had moved into the tastelessly furnished home of an absent professor. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” says Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” In a few years Bishop realized that these moves were a form of field research enabling Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Lolita was under way.

  Nabokov usually has at least two works-in-progress at roughly the same time, and these literary companions often turn out to complement each other in extraordinary ways; this is most true of Lolita and Speak, Memory (or Conclusive Evidence, as its first, shorter edition was titled in 1951.)

  In Speak, Memory, his fifth book in English, Nabokov became the master of a variegated and virtuoso prose; henceforth he would seek no further advice on English. Speak, Memory released him to write Lolita, and Lolita in her turn released him from the circumscribing spell of Speak, Memory, the cul-de-sac of nostalgia. It is no coincidence that after losing Lolita to Quilty, it takes Humbert three years to find her again, the same number of years Nabokov spent writing Speak, Memory. “The past is the past,” she tells him, after he has finally located but not recaptured his ineffable girl, now wan, veiny-armed, pregnant, a nymphet no more and badly in need of a few bucks.

  The novel developed slowly as Nabokov faced technical problems and absorbed the necessary couleur locale—as Humbert might say—by renting Charlotte Haze’s house, sampling teen-talk on school buses, reading case studies and movie magazines, observing, observing, wherever he went. Robert M. Adams, then in the English department at Cornell (“Ah, a duel!” Nabokov had exclaimed, when Adams appeared at the departmental office one morning with his newly broken arm in a sling), remembers a Monday morning in June, circa 1951, during the calm between commencement and summer session. A convocation of a youth group was to begin that day—the Young Lutherans or Future Farmers of America—and as Adams approached the wide bridge that separates the campus from the main dormitory area, he saw heading toward him, on the left side of the bridge, radiating the healthiness of a breakfast food ad, a seemingly endless swarm of blond and apple-cheeked junior-and senior-high-schoolers, and on the other side, walking alone in the opposite direction, his gaze taking them in, a man wearing hiking shoes, knee socks, baggy Bermuda shorts, a sporty cap, and carrying a butterfly net. As it crossed the bridge, the Norman Rockwell tableau vivant turned as one to stare in astonishment at him, since Nabokov was no doubt the first typical American college professor they had ever seen.

  Written before class in Ithaca, or in a parked car on cloudy Colorado afternoons while butterflies slept, or at night in a motel after a long day of “lepping,” Lolita was finally completed in the spring of 1954, surely no
placid period for the Nabokovs. Back in 1950, when he had been discouraged, Véra Nabokov had prevented her husband from throwing the initial chapters into the garden incinerator, but now that the book was a reality she must have experienced some misgivings and anxieties about its publication and possible reception; even tenured professors are vulnerable. “But she had no doubts about Lolita,” says Mrs. Bishop; “she knew it would be a classic.” Véra Nabokov was absent from lecture the last two weeks of the term (typing the manuscript, no doubt), and one day Nabokov startled the class by appearing without tie or jacket, in old tennis shoes, clearly a distracted man. One friend urged Nabokov to issue the novel anonymously; another refused to publish it for fear that they’d both be imprisoned. With no fanfare whatsoever, the Paris-based Olympia Press brought out Lolita in 1955. Three years later it was published in America.

  “A painful birth, a difficult baby, but a kind daughter,” Lolita enabled Nabokov, at sixty, to resign his professorship. Part of the fortune lost in 1919 had been restored exactly forty years later, the rubles miraculously converted to dollars, and the Nabokovs soon moved again, first to Hollywood to script Lolita, and then to Switzerland in 1960.

  Fifty years of renting furnished quarters has made Nabokov, along with Samuel Beckett, a laureate of the lonely room. He has learned to travel light, and his ambience at the Montreux Palace sustains this sense of him. The Palace is a grand hotel in the old tradition, with wide, spacious salons and lovely gardens, but there is nothing opulent about the Nabokov’s apartment on the sixth floor, overlooking Lake Geneva. The living room, where they receive guests, is small, as are the other rooms. There is no TV; they rent a set for important events such as the moon landing and the World Cup soccer championship (Nabokov, who played goalie at Cambridge, notes that Brazil’s spectacular player, Pele, “is powerful but has no style”). A card table next to the couch is stacked with books of recent vintage—mostly sent by publishers—which they are sampling and, in a few instances, reading. Nabokov recommends The Godbotherers, a novel by Philip Oakes, an Englishman, and is even more enthusiastic about The Butterflies of Japan. Paul McCartney, whom he has never met, has sent them his latest record album, the presentation note signed, “With love, Paul and Linda.” A still life recently painted by Dmitri, his son’s first try at oils, adds a genuine personal touch to the wall above the couch. Nabokov’s study, in the next room, contains a lectern, a desk and chair, and a bed. Although he prefers to write standing up, he may use any of the three, depending on the hour and the pull of gravity. The walls are bare, but arranged along the top of the desk are a little family photograph, a framed butterfly, and postcard reproductions of a Picasso still life, Pitcher, Candle, and Casserole, and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, the radiant rainbow wings of the angel Gabriel easily outshining those of the framed specimen. A conspicuous presence in the room is a multivolume Russian dictionary and a well-worn Webster’s Unabridged, second edition. Except for the back bedroom, which their part-time secretary has converted into an office, the Nabokov’s apartment gives the impression that they could be packed and ready to leave on the shortest notice.

  Nabokov rises at six A.M. and, armed with the discoveries of creative insomnia, begins to write immediately; Transparent Things is the title of the novel now in its early stages. By ten thirty, when he draws a hot bath, Nabokov has put in what many writers would call a full day’s work. The fair-weather schedule he was following during my most recent visit (August, 1970) would next find him, at around eleven o’clock, walking down to the Montreux station to buy his three daily newspapers, The Times of London, Le Monde, and the Paris Herald-Tribune, where he follows, with determined loyalty and attention, the open-ended comic-strip adventures of Buzz Sawyer and Rex Morgan, M.D. Returning along the lakeside, Nabokov comments on its flora, fauna, and filth; Lake Geneva has not been immune to the waste that has so befouled America. “I saw it coming in the States twenty years ago, and would tell people that,” says Nabokov, shaking his head, then deploring “the faddist aspects of the antipollution movement.” He points out a ginkgo tree he is very fond of, and pauses to examine the venation of one of its butterfly-like leaves (a small wonder also marked in Pale Fire, note to line 49). Further on, he stops to watch some swans. “An overrated bird,” he says, “the postures of its neck are grotesque, aesthetically absurd, and,” he adds, “how can you respect or trust a creature that goes about with such a dirty neck?”

  After lunch, there is coffee and conversation in the Nabokovs’ apartment: the butterfly in art, the prosody of prose (Bely and Melville), the art of Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and his favorites, Laurel and Hardy. That subject leads logically to Nabokov’s experiences in Hollywood while scripting Lolita: excellent “lepping” in the Hollywood hills and stimulating discussions with the film’s producer, who wanted Humbert to marry Lolita, a small compromise Nabokov was unwilling to make.

  The conversation turns to cannibalism. “It is not as uncommon as you’d think,” Nabokov says, recalling a Belgian poet he had known in the nineteen-thirties. The poet’s father had been a stationmaster. One day a terrible accident had severed a man’s leg, and the poet, then a very young man, had helped himself to the limb, “prepared and waiting on the track.”

  “I never believed that story,” says Véra Nabokov, with a tolerant smile.

  “It happened, it happened!” insists her husband. “I couldn’t make up such a story.”

  “I like people who have the gift of gab,” says Nabokov, generalizing. “I mean ‘good conversationalists,’” he adds, correcting himself, not wishing to hurt the feelings of anyone present. Nabokov clearly relishes good gab; gossip, anecdotes, and jokes pour forth from him, and he is one of those people whose laughter threatens to unseat them. To emphasize a point or underscore a punch line, he will often lower his head, wrinkle his brow, and peer over the top of his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor. His face, even at less animated moments, is very expressive, mobile; photographs reveal its protean qualities. “I’ve frequently been told I don’t look like me,” he says, pausing for a moment to enjoy the paradox. “Recently, a stranger, a tourist, approached me in the [hotel] garden, and said, ‘I know you! You’re … you’re … you’re General MacArthur’s brother!’” Nabokov shakes with mirth, and dabs his eyes with a handkerchief, and catches his empty coffee cup and saucer as they are about to topple from his lap.

  By three in the afternoon Nabokov retires for a rest and more work: the polishing of Dmitri’s rendering into English of Podvig (1931)—The Exploit, now retitled Glory—the last of his untranslated Russian novels (Nabokov was delighted to find a forgotten passage in which the reverie of his fantasizing hero seems to anticipate Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a story much admired by Nabokov). Then drinks and dinner, and more conversation. Close students of the artist’s metabolic patterns should note that Nabokov usually goes to bed by nine o’clock.

  When Nabokov doesn’t have visitors, he may spend the early afternoon reading in the hotel’s poolside garden (always keeping notepaper by his side in case the Muse speaks unexpectedly), or else take long walks, sometimes for three or four hours, doing a lot of work in his head. In the spring, when the butterfly hunting is best, Nabokov may walk (and run) as many as fifteen or twenty miles a day. It is not surprising that he is deeply tanned, firmly muscled, and looks considerably younger than his seventy-two years. Watching him kick around a soccer ball with Raffaello, one of the hotel’s cabana boys, underscores the connection between his penchant for exercise and the enormous enthusiasm and creative energy which have resulted in, among many other things, three major works since his sixty-third birthday (Pale Fire, the four-volume Onegin translation, and Ada).

  Wordplay is very much part of Nabokov’s personal manner. He has a habit of repeating a phrase that he has just spoken, of spearing a word in midair and toying with the pieces. “No, tape recorders are out,” he says. “No speaking off the Nabocuff. When I see one of those machines I start
hemming and hawing … hemming and hawing. Hemingwaying all over the place.”

  When reviewers use the tag “Nabokovian,” they are acknowledging that he is that rarest of artists—a man and a writer who discovers, defines, and expresses himself and his world in a voice that is consistently and uniquely his. Nabokov’s voice is most vibrant and identifiable when he is describing either his “passion for lepidopterological research” or his abhorrence of certain writers. “Had there been no Russian Revolution, I probably would have devoted myself solely to lepidopterology,” says Nabokov, whose aesthetic of objectivity and precision is clearly that of a naturalist: “The use of symbols [is] hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression … In high art and pure science detail is everything.” His statements go far in helping to place in a quite reasonable context his remarks on other writers, remarks which are variously thought to be arrogant, eccentric, outrageous, indefensible, funny but frivolous. The zest with which he exorcises “bogeys and shams from the hall of false fame” and the verbs he favors (“detest,” “loathe”) are bound to set sensitive teeth on edge, while his inscrutable dismissals of famous works (Death in Venice is “asinine”) rarely clarify his objections to them, or suggest the seriousness and consistency of his position or its source in the literary wars of Russia a hundred years ago. In the eighteen-sixties and-seventies, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and other influential radical polemicists insisted that literary artists be topical reporters and social commentators, and the proselytizing, ideological, and sociological nature of much nineteenth century Russian literature testifies to their success. Pushkin and Chekhov were attacked for their failure to be “relevant” and engage (to use today’s trite terms), as Sirin would be in the nineteen-thirties, and today’s Socialist Realism is the police state’s transmutation of those earlier criteria and supposedly progressive principles. Beleaguered or not, Solzhenitsyn is in the main tradition of Russian literature, and the ironies are, of course, tragic.