Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

  “My old friend Morris Bishop is a great stylist,” Nabokov wrote in reply, “and he has brought up the ‘Father Divine’s periodical’ on a wave of style. I don’t think I ever read it.

  “Nowadays, in Switzerland, I dip into quite a number of periodicals: The Herald Tribune, National Review, The New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, The Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Encounter, The Listener, The Spectator, The New Statesman, Punch, the London Sunday papers and so forth.”

  All spring, my questions and Nabokov’s answers spilled through the mails between Vienna and Montreux as covering letters scheduled and rescheduled our butterfly hunt. A rendezvous in Sicily in late April or early May was canceled because of Italy’s spring strikes. An early summer meeting in Lenzerheide, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, was confirmed and reconfirmed; then all was undone when Véra Nabokov took sick. A bad reaction to antibiotics had put her into a Geneva hospital and, now that she was out, a fortnight of bedrest had left her with circulatory trouble in her feet. The Nabokovs’ summer evenings were spent on their Montreux terrace as he read to her, in Russian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914. And who will deny that, from the Arbors of Ardis, there issued wild cackles of Laughter at the manly prose of this tragic, heroic political figure who would not risk going to Sweden to accept his Nobel Prize for fear Russia might force him into emigration?

  Finally, though, the great day arrives, and—with Nabokov’s chauffeur disabled and his auto garaged for repairs—I hire a taxicab for our butterfly expedition to the bird sanctuary at Grangette, six miles from Montreux. And an unwittingly jocose dispatcher sends us a Russian émigré cabbie, Mrs. Natalie Green-Skariatine, a Tartar who has “been out since 1920 and driving for thirty-nine years.” The lady has driven the Nabokovs before, and today’s conversation en route is in Russian.

  When we arrive, Nabokov tells the driver where to wait and leads me to some underbrush that he calls “most tempting.” He is looking for “a very interesting butterfly,” the Purple Emperor. After calling for “silence, not total silence, but some silence,” he describes “its beautiful violet sheen” and explains: “If you turn it this way and that way, the shimmer changes. It used to fly here until they asphalted this road. Now it’s getting scarcer and scarcer. I saw one the other day up in Caux, but I couldn’t look at it closer because it was flying higher and higher in such a hurry—Ahhhh!”

  With a whooshing backhand swoop, Nabokov bags a lemonish yellow butterfly and holds his throbbing net up for inspection.

  “A brimstone, not uncommon,” he says. “This was supposed to be the first butterfly ever noticed; hence the name butterfly. Another version has it that the name was derived from ‘flutter-by’—making it all a spoonerism!”

  As Nabokov releases the butterfly I congratulate him on his backhand. “I’m glad you appreciated that,” he says. “It’s not easy to take a flying butterfly because it dodges. The best way is to wait for it to settle on a flower or on damp earth; it’s quite easy to take.” He confesses to “a little spring training in the room,” more out of anticipation than necessity.

  For the next quarter-hour the pickings are slim, and when the hunt bogs down in swampy underbrush Nabokov decides to go back to our starting point and take a different turn. Along the way, he mentions some of the hazards of butterfly hunting, including vipers (“Their bites are not fatal—unless you’re ill or old or very young”), but dwells on bigger challenges:

  “I have walked among rattlesnakes. Yes, in Arizona, when I was writing the screenplay for Lolita. We would take my index cards in the morning and go out collecting and writing until lunch. And one day I remember killing an immense rattler that was just lying in wait for us when we came out toward the road. I was the first to hear its hysterical rattlings. Véra almost stepped on it, but I held her back. Then I picked up a piece of lead piping and smashed the thing. A moment later, I saw its female slithering away. Véra called me ‘St. George’ for quite a while after that.”

  From the perils of making the movie Lolita a decade ago, the talk shifts to the stage version, Lolita, My Love, a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry, that suffered grave personnel problems before it collapsed aborning last spring. Sight unseen (“but I have spies I incited to go see it”) Nabokov announces: “Both girls—the one they fired and the one who replaced her—were awful; little bosomy girls, the wrong type altogether.”

  Does he retain any artistic control over such things?

  “None whatsoever. I reason this way: If they’re going to do it someday, they’re going to do it. So I had better be around when they do it—not only to criticize the thing, but also to explain that I have nothing to do with it.”

  Dodging an occasional motorbike, we press on down the blacktopped road, then turn off as Nabokov announces: “The dimmer the place, the better the butterfly.” Our walk ends suddenly with a lash of his net. “This one I will take,” says Nabokov. “A lovely intergrade between the common Veined White and its cousin Bryony White.”

  The butterfly goes into a small glassine envelope that is secreted in an old Band-Aid box Nabokov keeps in his jacket pocket. “That envelope,” he explains, “will hold the butterfly until I want to spread it. In there I can keep my butterflies for years and years, hundreds of years. When I am ready, I have only to relax them between wet towels and leave them overnight—and the next day pin them …”

  “But the one in their now,” I ask, “is it still alive?”

  “Oh, you didn’t see me pinching it under the net? That killed it, though sometimes I have to re-pinch them. When Véra’s with me, she keeps an eagle eye on them. She hates to see half-dead butterflies.” With a “lovely intergrade” to take home to his ailing wife, Nabokov is soon willing to give up on his initial objective, the Purple Emperor. He admits that he was seeking it for sentimental reasons: “I just remember many places with it. As a boy, I hunted it in Bad Kissingen, in Bavaria.”

  Bearing his trophy, Nabokov returns to our waiting taxi, now pointed toward Montreux with the motor running.

  “Was it a successful day?” the driver asks in English.

  Gesturing knowingly toward me, Nabokov replies: “From his point of view, it was successful. From mine, well, I’ve had better days.”

  Later in the week, he will excuse himself to “go into hiding” and finish his new novel, Transparent Things, about which he will breathe not a word beyond the tentative title. But that will be merely an interlude. Rubbing his hands in anticipation, Vladimir Nabokov says: “Transparent Things is very nearly done, and then I have a rendezvous with The Butterfly on the Simplon on the fifteenth of the month.”

  An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

  Mati Laansoo / 1973

  From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, March 20, 1973. © CBC. Reprinted by permission.

  Mati Laansoo: How do you regard the Nobel Prize for Literature? The people who have seriously read your works realize that you are indisputably the greatest living author in the world. Given that, how do you explain the lamentable omission of your works by the Nobel Prize Committee? Is it a matter of geographic boundaries and ideological differences?

  Vladimir Nabokov: Your first question is so precisely and pleasantly phrased that I feel embarrassed by the display of vagueness with which I must formulate my reply. Now and then, in the course of the last three or four decades, I have caught myself idly reflecting on the attractive resemblance between the beginning of the name of that famous prize, and the beginning of my own name: N,O,B, N,A,B, what a delightful recurrence of letters! Alliteration, however, is a deceptive relationship. Its magic cannot hope to establish the fortunate link between laurel and brow. On the other hand, I do feel that as a writer I am not inferior to, say, Rabindranath Tagore (1913) or Grazia Deledda (1926); but then, of course, quite a number of uncrowned authors must exist, at this very moment, nursing the same forlorn feeling. In response to the conjecture at the end of your question, I can only affirm
my conviction that honest judges should not be prejudiced by my geopolitical situation—that of a non-progressive American hailing from a nonexistent Russia. The situation may look somewhat bizarre; it would be absurd to call it hopeless. After all, let us not forget that another Russian, in much the same position as I, did get that prize. His name is no doubt on your lips. I am referring of course to Ivan Bunin (1933).

  ML: One often hears the word “responsibility.” How do you hold yourself responsible to the children as an “elder,” in the anthropological sense?

  VN: I’m afraid that the little I know about anthropology as a science is limited to its taxonomic aspect dealing with the classification of various subspecies of homo sapiens and with problems relating to the skulls of ancestral forms of the creature. Otherwise, I find the subject of popular or “applied anthropology” tedious and even repulsive. The noun “elder,” within that frame of reference, conjures up for me the image of a shaggy hermit all beads and beard with a more or less prehistoric cast of rugged features and a cave of sorts in the background. Tribal generalizations mean nothing to me. I prefer to use the term “responsibility” in its proper sense, linked with moral tradition, with principles of decency and personal honor deliberately passed from father to son. I can speak also of responsibility in the capacity of an educator, of the professor of literature which I taught for some twenty years in America. Here I was on my own, founding my own tradition, following my own taste, creating my own artistic values and trying to impress my own approach to art upon the minds of my students—or at least some of my students. I am responsible for having taught those best children of my time a method of appreciation based on the artistic and scholarly impact of literary fiction, but I never was directly concerned with the general ideas that they might derive from this or that great novel or the question how they would apply its more or less obvious ideas to their own life. That was the duty and choice of their actual, not metaphorical, elders.

  ML: Having read your brief treatise on “Inspiration” in the Saturday Review of the Arts, I wonder, outside of your art, what tumbles your grimace from irritation to pain?

  VN: The list of things, big and small, that I find utterly hateful is a long one. Pet hates are generally more banal than loves. Let me limit myself to a few obvious samples. Cruelty comes at the top, then dirt, drugs, nuisance by noise, coat hangers of wire, modish words (such as “charisma” or “hopefully”), quick quack art, breaking a finger nail with no scissors in sight, mislaying my spectacle case, finding that the current issue of my favorite weekly is suddenly devoted to Children’s Books.

  ML: At what portals has the burglar of laughter broken and entered into your edifices?

  VN: Oh, laughter is not a burglar at all. Good old Laughter is a permanent lodger in every house I construct. He is in fact the built-in-roomer. He has the right to keep a mermaid in the bathtub. He is responsible for consigning Freud and Marx to the garbage can and destroying quite a few dictators. He drives some of my silliest critics mad with helpless rage. To extend your metaphors—which I seem to be doing all the time—my books would be dreary and dingy edifices indeed had that little fellow not been around.

  ML: Why do the Swiss make such good mercenaries and watches?

  VN: I am the last person to be consulted on the subject of watches. I am apprehensive of watches as some people are of a coiled snake—and how abnormal it is to carry a watch around your wrist or keep one in your waistcoat pocket like a spare heart! Despite my terror of them, I love expensive watches—I shall always remember a very flat, thin, golden one of Swiss make that I had as a foppish boy sixty years ago, it lay on the palm of my hand like a pool of cold dew; yet watches detest me. I have never had one that was not fast or slow, and it takes at least a fortnight to have a Swiss watch repaired in the place where it was bought; and most terrible of all are the fake clocks of clock-makers’ shop signs, which are set at a motionless and meaningless quarter to three to show how appealing they can spread their hands.

  ML: The eggheads’ endeavor involving the pressure-cooker blasted to the moon has hatched such rewards for mankind as Teflon, the five-year flashlight battery and the pocket mini-computer. How might the artist have hoped to improve on these dubious returns?

  VN: The undescribable excitement and delight of reaching a celestial body, of palpating its pebbles, of sifting its dust, of seeing things and shadows of things never seen before—these are emotions of unique importance to a certain uniquely important variety of man. We are speaking of divine thrills, aren’t we, not of comic-strip gadgets. Who cares for the practical benefits derived from the exploration of space! I shall not mind if more and more trillions of dollars are spent on visits to the moon or Mars. I would only recommend that our jaunty and fearless space sportsmen be accompanied by a few men of acute imagination, true scientists of Darwin’s type, an artistic genius or two—even some gray octopus of a poet who might lose his mind in the process of gaining a new world, but what does it matter, it is the ecstasy that counts.

  ML: Why did Fischer beat Spassky?

  VN: Apart from the fact that Fischer showed himself to be the better player, there are psychological complications to be reckoned with. Fischer, when he played that match, was the free champion of a free country with no whims barred and no fear of retribution for a fatal blunder. Wretched Spassky, on the other hand, always had a couple of stone-faced agents dogging him on an island with no escape or hiding place. He felt the presence and pressure of the Soviet police state all the time—and one wonders would Fischer have won had the roles been reversed and the eyes of those grim annotators followed his every move with the same governmental threat. The farcical little scene of the wife being flown over from Russia was, I thought, especially gruesome but also rather hilarious as a desperate hygienic measure revealing the peculiar animal stupidity that is in a way a redeeming feature of the most elaborate dictatorships.

  ML: A Canadian artist has intimated that time is the thing that stops everything happening at once, and space is the thing that stops it happening all in the same place. Could you comment on this?

  VN: That’s very neatly put. But it is only an aphorism, only a flourish of wonderful wit. It suggests the way a timepiece and a piece of space work in relation to each other, but it tells us nothing of the texture of time or the substance of space. When composing my chapter about Time in Ada, I concluded—and am still leaning upon the gate of that conclusion—I concluded that Time has nothing to do with Space, and is not a “dimension” in the sense that Space is a dimension. Thought, for example, in order to breed properly, needs the broth of Time, no matter how scanty, but does not require Space. Yet, even when we speak about a “little” time or a “long” time we are not actually referring to size, and what we measure is not Time itself or the distance between two tangible points of Time (as we measure Space), but a stretch of our own existence between two recollections in a medium which our mind cannot really grasp. Everything in the nature of life is impossible to understand but some things are less possible to understand than others, and Time is among the most slippery ones.

  ML: Is there anything that interests you about your audience, or, how would you interview your interviewer?

  VN: In the first flush of my so-called fame, just before World War II, around, say, 1938, in Paris where my last novel written in Russian started to run in an émigré magazine, I used to visualize my audience, with tender irony, as a small group of my Russian émigré fans, each with one of my books held in his hands like a hymnal, all this in the rather subdued light of a backroom in a café. Ten years later, in my American transposition, the room of my fancy had grown as large as a comfortable auditorium. Still later, more and more people had to stand for want of seats. Then, in the sixties, after the appearance of Lolita, several new halls had to be built, both in the New World and in the Old. I have readers now not only in Brazil and Israel, but in the Soviet Union where factually my works are banned and every ghostly smuggler is equal to a
hundred legitimate readers elsewhere. What interests me, or better say moves me, in regard to my present audience is that a figment of my fancy, not much more solid than an invented castle or cloud in one of my stories, has become an actual event. I am a shy, retiring person. I feel stupidly confused to have my books provoke such attention and ask so much of my readers, whose eyesight in some cases is not too good (as their nice letters, with stamps enclosed, tell me) and whose fathers or children happen to be hospitalized with some terrible terminal illness which a simple autograph from me would certainly cure. “Dear Vladimir Nabokov,” some say, “excuse me for using a page of my exercise book, but teacher has assigned all your books—and I am only a high school kid”—all this in the handwriting of an old professional collector of autographs. I am an old collector too, but of butterflies, not autographs, and it is my entomological hunts in Canada that come to my mind as my voice is being projected onto Canadian air. One of my favorite spots remains a ravine smothered in flowers, near Fernie, three miles east of Elko, British Columbia, where on a summer day in 1958 I collected specimens of a very local little blue butterfly (Lycaeides idas ferniensis) which I badly wanted for the Cornell University Museum. Your curiosity about audiences has produced, as you see, quite a bit of digressive response, so let me now have your tenth and last question.

  ML: How does your wife Véra Nabokov puzzle you?

  VN: I am puzzled by many things about her: by her inability to keep figures and dates in her head, by the disorder on her desk, by her gift of tracking down a needed item that is the more precious the more complicated the search in the maze. I marvel at the way she can quote by heart old Russian sayings and ditties—sometimes quite new to me after almost half-a-century of shared life. I find fascinating the accuracy with which she picks out the best book in the batch that publishers send me every month or so with their compliments and hopes. I am filled with wonder every time that my random thought or actual sentence is simultaneously voiced by her in those flashes of domestic telepathy whose mystery is only enhanced by their frequency. And I also find enigmatic the stroke of miraculous intuition that makes her find the right words of consolation to give me when something awful, such as a misprint somehow left uncorrected by me in a recent novel, causes me to plunge into a torrent of Russian despair.