Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  Checking in with Vladimir Nabokov

  Gerald Clarke / 1975

  From Esquire, July, 1975. © Gerald Clarke. Reprinted by permission.

  Vladimir Nabokov spreads his hands around the bulge of his stomach like a pregnant woman who, long past the time for such things, cannot quite believe what God and man have done to her. “My dear fellow,” he tells me, “I am gorged with questions.”

  Nabokov does not generally pride himself on his modesty, but he is, in fact, only telling the simple truth. Sometimes it seems he draws more people to Switzerland than do the Alps and secret bank accounts. Interviewers from both hemispheres badger him for audiences, and doctoral candidates in English literature, who have made Nabokov studies a growth industry in the graduate schools—just beneath the Big Three: Joyce, James, Eliot—write, call, and make the pilgrimage to Montreux in search of a blessing from the Master. Even ordinary tourists, who probably know only that he once wrote a dirty book called Lolita, have picked up the scent of Aging Literary Genius. During the season, they try to surprise Nabokov with their Nikons and Instamatics as he goes to buy the English and American papers or as he and his wife Véra take their customary constitutional along the promenade bordering Lake Léman. “One man even left a letter at the desk for us,” Véra told me crossly. “‘I have just bought an expensive camera,’ the letter said, ‘and I have waited three days to catch you unawares. But I haven’t seen you. When can I photograph you?’”

  For the first two thirds of his life, despite a steady outpouring of brilliance in Russian and English, which he learned simultaneously as a child, fame eluded Nabokov like one of those butterflies he is always chasing. Its shimmering wings were always fluttering, with bright, airy arrogance, just out of reach, half a step ahead. Now, though he has violated all the accepted rules of the literary hype, fame lights on his shoulder, takes its ease on his nose and throws its wing dust on his pince-nez as it dances before his eyes. Instinctively and with low cunning, the amateur paparazzi, the journalists, and the importuning graduate students have stumbled on a certain, but rarely advertised, truth: in an age in which everything is rated, novelists—like pitchers, boxers, racehorses, and French poodles—are numbered on a chart, and every five years the professors and the critics bring it out for revision. And today, as he has been for the last half decade or so, Nabokov, a semi-reclusive Russian who lives in Switzerland but claims that he is as American as April in Arizona, is No. 1 on the Quality Lit. Ladder, with no serious challenger in sight. Writers as unalike as Mary McCarthy, George Steiner, Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike have strewn his path with critical roses: Oates—not overlooking Homer, Shakespeare, and Norman Mailer—has written that Nabokov is “as exciting as any writer who has ever lived,” and I have seen such a disparate pair as Gore Vidal and John Barth grow positively misty-eyed, or as misty-eyed as these cool gentlemen ever get, when they talk about Nabokov’s work.

  For some people, respect is tempered by fear, and when he becomes angry, Nabokov, his critical powers undiminished at seventy-six, hurls such high-voltage thunderbolts from his Montreux mountainside that Jupiter himself might snatch up his toga in alarm and scurry for shelter with the rest. The ink still stings from his epical exchange in the mid-sixties with his onetime friend Edmund Wilson, who dared to denigrate Nabokov’s four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Lesser figures who disturb Nabokov’s Alpine calm are crushed as well, and of course journalists writing about him have suffered from his ire. One reporter who talked with him a few years ago was so unstrung at the prospect of actually shaking hands with such a fearsome monument, let alone risking its wrath, that he stopped several times during the hour-long drive from Geneva, each time to vomit from nervousness into Lake Léman; and an editor who had business with Nabokov came close to turning around half a dozen times and calling in sick. Both visitors, I should add, were treated, as I was, with extreme, elaborate courtesy.

  My own experience was that the Master of Montreux is more fearsome in prospect than in person—but not so many managed the chance to make that judgment. Like everyone else who interviews Nabokov, I first had to negotiate with Véra, who handles all such matters. He would sit down with me, she wrote briskly, only if I agreed to several conditions: I would have to state my questions in writing; I would have to ascribe to Nabokov only what he would actually say; and I would have to pledge to show him my finished story and make “whatever alterations he requests.” The first two conditions were easy enough. I had not, of course, planned to misquote him anyway and, having learned his habits from Strong Opinions, a compendium of his likes and dislikes, I had anticipated, however reluctantly, being required to submit written questions. Nabokov, after all, looks at everything he writes or says with a magnifying glass over his eye, like a jeweler inspecting the insides of a watch; he visibly squirms at the possibility, however unlikely, of a verbal accident, an inappropriate adjective set bawling before a strange noun or an innocent participle left dangling atop an ungrammatical chasm. “I admire people who can speak and it all comes out in well-ordered, beautifully rounded sentences,” he later told me. “I cannot do that. I can’t speak that way. I am an idiot in conversation.”

  The third stipulation, however, that I submit the story for approval and possible changes, was one I could not agree to, and I told Véra so. She gracefully relented in the next mail, explaining, somewhat apologetically, that her husband had had a bad experience not long before with someone who had then tried to psychoanalyze him in print. Psychoanalyze Nabokov! Next to the Bolsheviks, he hates no one so much as the Freudians. Probably nothing could be more distasteful to him than a session with a shrink, amateur or otherwise. In almost every book, he mounts a harsh slap or two at the analytic profession, and he has described poor Sigmund himself as everything from that “figure of fun” to the “Viennese quack.” For my part, I promised Véra that I would not play analyst with my typewriter. The interview, finally, was arranged, and in mid-September I arrived in Montreux.

  To say that Montreux is mummified would be an overstatement, but not much of one. Situated between Vevey and Chillon, whose castle Byron immortalized (“Chillon! thy prison is a holy place”), it really has only two streets, one high, one low, running parallel to Lake Léman. The Montreux Palace Hotel, where the Nabokovs have lived for more than a decade, is Montreux’s best, one of those vast piles in which Henry James’ rich, young American heroines used to stay with their mothers while taking the waters, falling in love, catching consumption. The hotel now caters to summer vacationers, conventioneers, and a score or more elderly residents like the Nabokovs, all of whom nod and bob in friendly, old-fashioned formality as they pass. In an effort to get with it, the management has recently modernized, and it now brings guests into the lobby from the street in an all-glass elevator, greeting them with piped-in music—rock and Johnny Cash—several decibels too loud. Fortunately for Nabokov, who abhors strange sounds assaulting him from hidden places, modernization has not yet penetrated into the hotel’s annex, where he and Véra have a suite of small rooms, with an office across the hall and a space in the attic for excess books. A Spanish cook, who can prepare four simple dishes very well, according to Véra, makes all their meals, and only when visitors like me appear do the Nabokov’s venture down to the hotel’s grand dining room.

  The concierge was expecting me when I checked in, and he immediately handed me an envelope. “I shall be down in five minutes,” Nabokov’s letter began, “giving you time to look through my replies to your questions. Please tell Esquire that work on these writings takes me such a long time (first a draft is laboriously composed, then my wife corrects the slips of my pencil, and then my secretary types the Q’s and A’s in their final form) that I would expect Esquire to pay me for my contributions—or at least to airmail me a free copy of every issue of the magazine in the future.” When I had finished the letter, the concierge then sent me to a lounge down the hall, where I followed directions, sat down, and read Nabokov�
�s answers to my questions:

  Gerald Clarke: What are you working on now, or preparing to write?

  Vladimir Nabokov: At the moment I’m basking in the afterglow of a novel I have just completed, Look at the Harlequins! (do not drop the exclamation mark). This stage of retrospective sunbathing is a very short, very private affair, unconnected with any awareness of impending publication, etc. It includes a mental rereading of the thing in spectral script. My next task is a meticulous checking of the French translation of Ada—a huge bedraggled tome typed on anemic paper. The preparation of an interview for the German TV and the examining of an English translation of yet another collection of my old Russian stories will fill up the intervals between the next chapters of Fayard’s adventures with Ada. And after that, or still somewhere in between, I shall go on accumulating the bones and flints of a new novel—a rather paleontological kind of research in reverse, so to speak. According to some of my criticasters, the unfortunate readers of my books have to look up words like “paleontological.”

  GC: Could you describe a typical day in the life of V. N.? Do you have any habits or devices that get you started writing, like sharpening pencils or filling pens? Schiller was supposedly comforted by the odor of rotting apples in his desk, while Balzac (or was it Hugo?) would put on a monk’s robe before writing the first sentence each day. Do you have any similar spur to the imagination?

  VN: Friends would sigh and foes grind their teeth if I relisted for the hundredth time my daily habits to an innocent interviewer. It is all in my Strong Opinions, you know. All I care to repeat is that the first sentence of the day is composed in my morning bath.

  GC: Which modern writers do you read for pleasure? Are there any living writers you particularly admire? Or particularly dislike?

  VN: I find morbidly fascinating the leisurely letters in which English authors of a former age praise at length contemporaneous writers (mostly their correspondents) or revile in detail writers belonging to other so-called “groups” or “schools” of the time. And mind you, those epistolarians’ professional output was a tomb-slab-thick novel per year. My personal letters are rare and brief. Though anything but a prolix novelist, I fear squandering the energy reserved for my novels. On the other hand, I am happy to report that my library of modern literature, which is housed in an attic kindly allotted to me by the hotel, is growing steadily owing to contributions from publishers. A great number of those volumes are ephemeral—you know the type—romances all slaughter and semen or collections of essays by pretentious hacks—but when I think of the care that went into every detail of the jacket, into this or that pathetic little touch of the printer’s art, I feel disinclined to ridicule the dream between the covers.

  GC: Your life has been divided into geographic segments—Europe, America, and now Europe again—yet you are an American citizen. Do you still consider yourself American? Do you think that your writing has an American accent?

  VN: I have spent nineteen years in Russia, three in England, sixteen in Germany, four in France, twenty in America, thirteen in Switzerland. Of these the longest time segment is the American one. I am American.

  GC: Someone has described you, with some admiration, as “a brilliant monster.” Would you care to comment? Do you feel very monstrous?

  VN: I guess you’ve invented that “someone” but it is a plausible invention. One of the definitions that my dictionary gives under “monster” is “a person of unnatural excellence.” Of course, I’m aware of my unnatural excellence. I am aware of it, however, only in certain domains (too obvious to be mentioned); but I also am aware of my hopeless ineptitude in other matters such as technology, finance, music and go-getting, to name a few. The epithet “brilliant” is a little redundant. Most monsters have shining appendages or eyes.

  GC: In its concern for memory and the recollection of specific detail, your writing reminds me of Prousts.’ Do you see any resemblance?

  VN: I see no resemblance whatever. Proust imagined a person (the “Marcel” of his long fairy tale In Search of Lost Time) who had a Bergsonian concept of past time and was thrilled by its sensual resurrection in sudden juxtapositions pertaining to the present. I am not an imaginary person and my memories are direct rays deliberately trained, not sparks or spangles.

  GC: You are now in your mid-seventies. How do you feel as you look back at your life? Have you accomplished all or most of the things you hoped to accomplish, or has some goal eluded you?

  VN: The literary line of my fate from 1920 to 1940 is what I expected at nineteen. I have written in Russian the kind of books I wanted to write. The English ones that followed in the next thirty-four years are a rare recompense for the trouble I took over my first compositions in my native language. If any goal has eluded me, it must be sought in another domain, that of lepidopterology. At the middle point of my life (1940–48), I used to devote many hours daily, including Sundays, to the working out of taxonomic problems in the laboratories of two great museums. Since my years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard, I have not touched a microscope, knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well. Thus I have not, and probably never shall, accomplish the greater part of the entrancing research work I had imagined in my young mirages, such as “a monograph of the Eurasian and American machaon group,” or “The Eupisthecia of the World.” Gratitude for other pleasures leaves, really, no room in my mind for that ghost of regret.

  GC: Are you still an insomniac?

  VN: I have lately started jogging before turning in. Delightful! Keeping it up for a couple of hours, in the deepening dusk, along lakeside lanes, is both exhilarating and soothing. Except for a few pairs of lovers disentangling themselves to watch my passage, there is nobody to notice me. I wear tennis shorts and a heavy sweater which I usually shed after the first hour. I’m afraid I’ve made up this story in toto but it shows how desperate I am beginning to be in my fight with insomnia. Harmless pills have ceased to affect me, and I decline to rely on brutal barbiturates. My afternoon siesta has stretched to almost three hours, and my night’s sleep has dwindled to about the same length of time. At least two kind strangers have suggested a little warm milk with a spoonful of honey at bedtime.

  GC: Which of your books do you remember with the greatest pleasure? Of which character are you fondest?

  VN: Oh, the The Gift and Lolita, of course, and also the novels I wrote in the sixties and seventies. And the four volumes of my work on Eugene Onegin. I am inordinately fond of those old books. (My weakest is certainly Laughter in the Dark, by the way.) As to the characters in them, I cannot love them separately, they are on a par with the fantasy and the fun and the moth on the mottled tree trunk.

  GC: If you had had a choice, what language would you have preferred to have been born with?

  VN: Russian.

  On that emphatic note, the author himself appeared, with Véra at his side. Others, who have known them longer, say that both Nabokovs have aged markedly in the last couple of years. I can only guess that, until recently, they must then have looked younger than they were because, for their ages, both seemed to me exceedingly fit and healthy. Nabokov was more stooped than I had expected, but, in his walking shorts and long socks, he was all ruddy alertness, a testament to Swiss air and mountain water—he even boasts in Strong Opinions that he can still walk fifteen miles a day. Véra, who has had snowy white hair since she was twenty-five, seems at this point almost ageless, as if, by giving up then her youthful color, she had made a compromise with time all those years ago and plans to insist as long as she lives on the exact terms of the contract. A compatriot of theirs who saw them both at émigré gatherings in Paris in the thirties, admiringly describes Véra as having been “quick, very quick, with great personal charm.” And so she still is.

  As he sat down, Nabokov was as amiable as he had been unamiable in the letter, written that day, that had come with his answers. He offered me a drink—“A gin and tonic perhaps?”—and professed amazement, shock and i
ncomprehension when I wanted instead a local Swiss beer, the agreeable but slightly acidic Feldschlossen.

  “Feldschlossen!” he snorted, waking up the lounge, which seemed, like the rest of the hotel in that off-season, to be in a hibernating doze. “Feldschlossen is for field mice! Try a German beer.”

  “Maybe he likes light beer,” Véra gently suggested.

  “It’s not a question of light or dark. It’s a question of good or bad,” Nabokov argued, pointing out the aesthetic issue involved. We met halfway, on a neutral bottle of Danish Carlsberg, and moved on. He corrected my handy copy of Look at the Harlequins!, in which a misprint on page eight, particularly annoying because it was not obvious, had turned a “confirmed madman” into a “confined madman,” and he happily accepted my gift of Gore Vidal’s Myron. The latest volume of Vidal’s Forsyte Saga, in modern drag, had recently come out in the United States, and I thought that it might make Nabokov’s celebrated insomnia bearable for an hour or two—or else, depending on his taste, cure it entirely. Besides that, I knew that Vidal had had an apartment in Switzerland and that, though they have never met, the two authors enjoy exchanging polite barbs from time to time through a mutual woman friend. “Vidal calls my husband the Black Swan of Lake Léman,” Véra told me. “But he is so witty you can’t get angry.”