Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  Within ten minutes, Nabokov, having dissected Lolita and put her together intact for export to Prague, relaxed and chatted about himself, his health, and hotel living. His health was self-evident. I had just met Nabokov’s uphill neighbor, Noel Coward, who is eight months the author’s junior and was looking a good eight years older.

  Speaking of Coward, whom he’s never met, Nabokov said he was amused to be living in a community of Humbert Humberts. Coward had been offered the part in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of Lolita (Nabokov wrote the screenplay, and Kubrick used just enough of it to justify Nabokov’s legal position as author of the script). Coward declined the part of Humbert because, he said, “We weren’t able to finish reading the book.” James Mason, who did play the part, lives five miles from Montreux and is a good friend of both Coward and Nabokov.

  Nabokov does not number himself among the local Humberts, having once written: “ … my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him.” When I asked if he could give any instances of mistaken identity involving Humbert and himself and if he could list the most salient features they have in common, Nabokov replied: “Well, we both like tennis.” Indeed, Nabokov once supported himself in Berlin by teaching tennis as well as English and Russian and by constructing crossword puzzles and chess problems.

  Now we talked about a mutual ex-publisher in another country, and Nabokov said of him: “He’s a rather astute man with a coarse streak right down the middle and—do you know?—I think it’s his coarse part that kept me with him for so long. Each time I visited his city, he would take me home for dinner and—every single time—he would tell me, as we crossed his threshold, ‘This is the house Lolita built.’ Well, I’ve wrecked some lives in my time, but I also like to think that at least I made a house.”

  As he spoke, we were joined by a tall, regal, alabaster-skinned lady whom Nabokov introduced proudly as “the person to whom I’ve been married for forty-five years.” Véra Evseevna Slonim Nabokov—daughter of a Jewish industrialist from St. Petersburg—is the Véra to whom all of his novels (six written in English and nine translated from Russian) published in English are dedicated. She is his confidante, proofreader, chief literary counselor and devoted audience as well as his partner at chess, Scrabble (often played in Russian), hiking, strolling, butterfly-hunting and business negotiating. “In wheeling and dealing,” says a friend, “he is the silent partner. She does the arguing and he does the deciding.”

  From their émigré days together in Berlin (1925–37) and then Paris (1937–40) through academic days at Wellesley and then Cornell (1948–59) and onward into Alpine opulence, Mrs. Nabokov has always been the household manager and chauffeur. Despite his Humbert’s climactic odyssey through the neon highways and motel courts of America, Nabokov does not pretend to be a driver. Much of Lolita was scrawled on index cards in a 1952 Buick during a transcontinental butterfly hunt with Véra at the wheel. Her husband was no help to her at all; he said in Ada, published in 1969: “There are people who can fold a road map. Not this writer.”

  Because Véra is fiercely protective of her man, outsiders tend to have more contact with her than with him, and there were those in Montreux who were willing to “assure” me that she ghostwrites him. “At the very least,” said one such confidant, “they certainly must have collaborated on Invitation to a Beheading.” They know Nabokov as the benign pedestrian who makes a point of buying Time and Newsweek and The International Herald Tribune at three different newsstands (“They’re all good shops. It wouldn’t be fair to give one of them all the business, would it?”).

  How could the theory that Mrs. Nabokov does the writing gain such currency in Montreux, particularly among tradesmen? Nabokov took that question in writing and supplied a written answer:

  “The charm of that rumor is enhanced by the fact that what most Montreusiens seem to know of my work, or of its shadow, is the film Lolita (shown in Switzerland half-a-dozen years ago). My wife reads my stuff only after I have completed the fair copy in longhand on lined index cards, which I fill out while standing at my lectern or lolling in the garden. I am an uncommunicative toiler, and in the case of the longer novels my patient first reader awaits the unknown book with serenity for years and years. Formerly, that is before we could afford secretaries, she used to type all my works and correspondence. She continues to read, very carefully, typescripts and proofs, correcting my grotesque misspellings and sometimes querying an obscure or repetitious word. She also types my Russian letters. It may very well be that the observant and intelligent people who bring me fruit and wine, or come to repair radiators and radios, jump to wrong conclusions because they never see me sitting at a desk, let alone typing.”

  At first one is struck by Mrs. Nabokov’s crowning glory, her snow-white hair. (“I still think of her hair whenever I hear the phrase ‘White Russian,’” says one of her husband’s former Cornell students.) Mrs. Nabokov sensed my admiration before I could express it and said matter-of-factly: “It started turning when I was twenty-five.” Her husband added: “Véra was a pale blonde when I met her, but it didn’t take me long to turn her hair white.”

  She apologized for joining us a little late; she had been upstairs searching for two trophies. Now she gave them to me for the translator in Prague. One was a bootleg edition of Lolita, translated by the author into his native Russian, “not because I wanted tourists to smuggle it in, but because I was more afraid some Moscow hack would do a translation and—well, for example, there’s no such term as ‘blue jeans’ in the Russian language.”

  “I think there is now,” I told Nabokov, who hasn’t been back to Russia since fleeing the Bolsheviks with his family on a small and shoddy Greek ship carrying a cargo of dried fruit. “Behind the Iron Curtain these days, everyone wears one kind of blue jeans—made in East Germany, I think—with the brand name ‘Super Rifle,’ in English, sewn onto the right side of the seat.”

  Vladimir Nabokov loved that! He began to cackle—at the thought, he explained a minute later, of someone going through Lolita substituting “Super Rifle” for “blue jeans.” “It would be a whole new book!” By Freud, no doubt.

  The Slavonic words in his Russian Lolita (which was printed in New York and retails on the Leningrad black market for 20 rubles, or two “Zhivagos”) would help his Czech translator with her work, he said. The Nabokovs’ other trophy for her was a huge $5.95 paperback called The Annotated Lolita, edited by Prof. Alfred Appel Jr. of Northwestern University. Nabokov described Appel as “my pedant. A pedant straight out of Pale Fire. Every writer should have such a pedant. He was a student of mine at Cornell and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.” Looking positively cherubic, Nabokov paraphrased his earlier remark about wrecking some lives but making others.

  Nabokov spends most of the year—except for business trips and one long butterfly-collecting expedition—in Montreux. The Palace Hotel, he said, provides adequate insulation, but enough uninvited callers still filter through. Some are doing Ph.D. dissertations on him or on a paragraph of his work; others are just admirers or social butterflies or would-be interviewers.

  “Every Englishman, no matter what his title or credentials, turns out to be a journalist of some sort, but I enjoy talking with them. The Americans I seem to meet are often out to get more than they’re here to give, so I tend to be wary. Not long ago, there was someone with an American name who kept leaving vague messages for me all over Montreux. I started leaving messages, too, that I was unavailable. Then I got one more message—a slip of paper that said, ‘F—you.’

  “Well, this was so much more explicit than the others that I asked the desk what kind of person had left this message. And the desk said: ‘That wasn’t a person, sir; that was two rather wild-looking American girls.’ This intrigued me even more, so I looked at the slip of paper again. And there I found something at the end of the messag
e which I hadn’t noticed on my first reading: a question mark!”

  Mrs. Nabokov changed the subject—even before our laughter died down—by asking me if I would “look in on Vladimir’s younger sister, who still lives in Prague.” It turned out that Nabokov’s widowed sister, Olga, sixty-seven (to whom he sends fifty dollars a month), lived in the same district I did. Olga’s late son married a Czech girl, and now it was Olga’s devotion to her Czech grandson that, above all, kept her in Prague despite the discomforts of being a Russian living among Czechs, not to mention a Russian “of class origins” in what was now a Soviet colony held by the Red Army.

  The lady who came to dinner in Prague one December Sunday had the same head, eyes and chin as her brother, plus a fairly thick crown of brown hair. “It’s all my own!” she began, without waiting to be complimented. She talked with my family and me in Czech, French, and English—all with gargled “R’s” and with the recurrent note of world-weary certainty that is the mark of émigrés, including (to a slighter degree) her brother. Though she had another married name, she wanted to be called “Nabokovová.” She said: “Tell me, before I even take off my coat, what my brother is like!”

  Her intense curiosity about the brother she hadn’t seen for more than three decades barely lasted until we sat down in our living room. For Olga Nabokovová wanted to chat about beaux-arts. She had arrived a little out of breath from the official “Days of Soviet Culture,” a month-long “festival” that most Czechs were boycotting. “How could I resist the show of Russian art from the Hermitage—from my own native city?” she demanded. Then she launched into a description of the exhibition and a discourse on Yugoslav religious wood carving.

  The tide of talk swept to the dinner table, where I worked in the names of Nora Kaye and Margot Fonteyn. Olga Nabokovová suddenly said: “But, as for men dancers, it always strikes me as laughable when men go up on their toes.” Here, she made a little finger ballet and both my children began to giggle. “Well,” she went on, “it isn’t at all masculine, is it?” Our guest was soon laughing so infectiously, as were my wife and children, that I found myself laughing, too, at the very idea of a man dancing!

  “But that’s incredible!” Nabokov exclaimed a few months later in Montreux when I told him about the conversation with his sister. “Because that’s almost exactly what my mother used to say about ‘male ballerinas.’” He stared into his gin and tonic, apparently unable to fathom why good things die while prejudices endure.

  We were in the Green Room again, on a winter afternoon. Mrs. Nabokov said: “Olga wrote to us that you never invited her back, and she was very angry with you. But I wrote to her that you’d been expelled from Czechoslovakia soon after she saw you.” Then Véra riveted me with the stare that precedes a pronouncement. “You are a bright young man,” she said, “but you have one failing in perception: the places you’ve picked to live. First Prague, now Vienna. The Austrians were worse than the Germans. We never travel in those countries.” (And Adolf Eichmann, given a copy of Lolita to read in prison, remarked: “That is quite an offensive book.”)

  Mrs. Nabokov’s words were punctuated by a jolting thump from above. In the off-season, workmen were painting and pummeling the turreted façade of the Montreux Palace.

  “Isn’t that disgraceful!” she exclaimed. “The hotel shouldn’t rent rooms when they’re making this kind of noise.”

  “That last was not the noise of workmen, my dear,” her husband interjected. “That was the noise of small American children.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “They run differently, they play differently and they fall differently from European children.”

  What does the author of Lolita think of little American children?

  “I don’t know any.”

  He did betray an opinion, though, when the conversation turned to his empire on the hotel’s sixth floor. Mrs. Nabokov began to describe it: “Seven rooms, including two libraries, plus three bathrooms and four telephones, and we’re starting to outgrow all that. The furniture is a joke …”

  “Except for my marvelous wooden lectern,” said Nabokov, referring to the living room rostrum at which he usually writes—on index cards while standing—from shortly after 5:30 A.M. until 3:30 P.M. “The hotel found the lectern somewhere and gave it to us soon after we moved in. It was used by Flaubert once.”

  “It’s Louis Quinze or something,” said Mrs. Nabokov, “but it’s broken.”

  “It’s very old and very shaky,” her husband conceded, “but it’s not broken.”

  “Well, there’s a crack in the connecting wood between two legs,” Véra argued.

  “Let’s just say that the legs are the weakest part,” Nabokov suggested. “Looking at it, I can only guess that some Early American child came over to Europe and set about systematically kicking it to pieces.”

  She said: “As soon as it finally goes, I have the name of an excellent carpenter who made something like it for Mr. James Mason. But we hesitate to order it now.”

  “No need, no need,” said he, and I think there was a glimmer of superstition behind his words.

  Nabokov referred further questions about the way he works to a 1964 Playboy interview conducted by Alvin Toffler. In it, Nabokov, reading prepared answers from his index cards, said:

  “I do not begin my novel at the beginning. I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four. I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. That is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later, when my whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times. About three cards make one typewritten page, and when finally I feel that the conceived picture has been copied by me as faithfully as physically possible—a few vacant lots always remain, alas—then I dictate the novel …”

  Nabokov’s initial reaction to the suggestion that I interview him for a profile had been one of casual indifference. “You know,” he said, “if I’d ever wished to be a journalist, it would have been to cover Manson. That trial fascinates me. So much has been made of it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Even the President of the United States got into the act to pronounce him guilty.”

  “Well, he was absolutely right to do that!” Nabokov snapped. “If I were President, I’d have done it, too. Manson and those girls—they’re cretins! They’re not capable of thought.” He mimicked their explanations: “We stuck the forks into her stomach so that her baby would never have to fight in the war.” Then he asked, “What war?”

  “The war in Vietnam,” I guessed.

  “Do you think those girls and Manson ever knew anything about the war in Vietnam? Yes, it exists, it’s an idea to them, but it’s hardly perceived. They talk about it, but they have no idea what they’re talking about.”

  Inevitably, Manson generated a three-way argument. I spoke as a journalist, recognizing that our thirst for colorful copy creates “cretins” like Manson, and that the glory we grant them inspires a certain cult of “dumb intellectuals” who are quite ready to pass shallow judgments.

  “Do you honestly believe that?” asked Mrs. Nabokov, impaling me again with her stare. “Only someone on drugs could be reached by a Manson. Why do you call them a cult? … I favor hanging them.” Her husband said he opposed capital punishment, but added: “If the aim of jail is rehabilitation, you cannot rehabilitate such people. Certainly, they should be caged for life.”

  “Then they’ll be out in twelve years,” said Mrs. Nabokov. “They’re too dangerous. I was listening to the radio the other day and there was some baboon of a film producer in Paris saying, ‘Manson expressed what a lot of us are feeling. We’re all behind you, Charlie!”

  “There!” I said. “Doesn’t that indicate Manson’s influence extends beyond his ‘family,’ and is spread by the media?”

  “That baboon must have been on drugs, too,” she answered.


  “Even so,” her husband pointed out, “we have friends to fit the description of ‘dumb intellectuals.’” He whispered a name to his wife, then told her and me: “That couple is perfectly capable of coming out and saying something outrageous like ‘We’re all behind you, Charlie.’”

  In a later, written exchange, I asked Nabokov why the Manson case fascinates him and why it made him wish to be a journalist. He replied:

  “I have a taste for case histories, and it would have interested me greatly to look for one spark of remorse in that moronic monster and his moronic beast girls. I would also have been interested to find more about the cretins who ‘admire’ those brutes.”

  “As one American to another,” I asked, “where do you stand on Vietnam?” He answered: “All I know is that I would not like S. Vietnam to turn into Sovietnam, and that blunders do not win wars.”

  Though it was winter when we spoke of Manson and Vietnam in Montreux, butterflies soon danced in the margin of our dialogue. I suggested that, when I rejoined Nabokov, it ought to be for butterfly-hunting. He took to the idea.

  The day before he had played hooky from his writing to shop for shorts in Lausanne, fourteen miles away, in anticipation of the 1971 butterfly season. He had been looking for “something younger and narrower than heretofore,” though not the “hot pants” the tailor dared to dandle before him. “The tailor and I talked for more than an hour, although we didn’t settle everything. So I suppose I must make another trip to Lausanne before spring comes. Why, I talk about a trip to Lausanne the way others talk about a trip to Hawaii! Well, I only get over to Lausanne once or twice a year, though I go to New York or London or Rome oftener.”

  I asked about Nabokov’s reading, his sources of information on the outside world, and mentioned Prof. Morris Bishop, who brought the author from Wellesley to Cornell and once recalled:

  “I was fascinated not only by the range and depth of Vladimir’s knowledge but by his exclusions. He had small interest in politics, none in society’s economic concerns. He cared nothing for problems of low-cost housing, school consolidation, bond issues for sewage-treatment plants. He got the news not from The New York Times, but from The Daily News, quivering with wickedness, lust and bloodshed. He subscribed for a time to Father Divine’s periodical, revelatory of a lurid, exalted world. His study was rather of human behavior and misbehavior than the pratings of men in power.”