By way of conversation, I reminded Nabokov that another writer, Thomas Pynchon, had attended his course at Cornell in the late fifties, and I asked him if he remembered his most celebrated student. He did not—though Véra, who had helped him grade student exams, did.
“My wife remembers him by his handwriting,” Nabokov said. “It was very good.”
“No,” she corrected him. “It was very bad, half written, half printed.” He had tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s newest, biggest, and best novel, Nabokov added somewhat dolefully, but he could not understand it and gave it up. It was a charming confession, I thought, to have come from the author of Ada, that vast metaphorical mansion with trompe l’oeil doors, helical hallways, and booby-traps even for the very wary.
Later, over dinner in the hotel dining room, with the maître d’ and his staff circling around like nervous destroyers protecting their flagship, the Nabokovs became friendlier still. Nabokov, who had abandoned knee socks and cardigan for a grey suit, grey V-neck sweater, and grey tie, with a pincenez for the menu, was by turns a superb, funny storyteller, whose eyes would water at his own elegant, elongated punchlines, and a dogged interviewer, with as many questions for me as I had for him.
Both he and Véra were extremely curious about life in America, which they had left in 1960 to be nearer to their only child, Dmitri, who was then launching a career as an opera singer in Italy. (Dmitri, now forty-one and unmarried, is still singing, and the Nabokovs, who obviously adore him, still remain nearby. At six feet five, Dmitri towers above old dad, loves to ski, pilot speedboats and drive fast cars; he has translated his father’s old Russian novels into English, and a novel in English, Transparent Things, into Italian.) They lighted on Montreux, a place that, for reasons I can scarcely fathom, has historically attracted writers. “Shelley and Byron were both here with their two girls,” Nabokov told me. “Later there were the Russians. It was here that Gogol came and beat the lizards with his stick because in Russia they are meant to represent the devil with their naked tails. And then, of course, there was Tolstoy.”
The Nabokovs had both been happy in America, however, which provided them with much, including security and comfort, that revolutionary Russia had taken away. They enjoyed life at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York, and they would travel thousands of miles through the West each summer vacation in search of butterflies, particularly the blues Nabokov so much admires. Lolita was written in the course of those trips, Véra driving their ’52 Buick across plain and prairie while Nabokov scribbled endlessly on his ever-present three-by-five index cards. (Ada, his longest book, was written on 2500 such cards.) Nabokov, in fact, has expressed the regret that they had not gone to the United States even earlier than they did, and he and Véra are as stoutly protective of their adopted country as any American Gothic Republican with a flagpin in the lapel. “The Germans are usually quite right when they hate Germany,” said Véra, who is Jewish. “The Americans are never right when they hate America.” At another time she complained about criticism of the C.I.A., whose role in subverting the Allende government in Chile had just been found out. “Why shouldn’t the United States try to stop governments it disagrees with?” she demanded. “The Communists certainly do.” Because of its radical politics, she told me, she and her husband call The New York Review of Books the “Barbarous Review.”
“Will you ever return to America?” I asked her husband. “I think so,” he answered. “At first we came here for certain family reasons. Then we stayed on. But it is so hard in America to find a place that is not terribly expensive.”
“I don’t think you will find any place in America as expensive as it is right here,” I suggested. The Nabokovs seemed surprised to hear me say so—and more than a little interested. There is a widespread impression that Nabokov is, like a mountain Prospero, above thinking about money in his protected aerie. “Nabokov is beyond money,” Norman Mailer recently told an interviewer from Rolling Stone, as if he were merely repeating something so obvious and so well-known that it did not need amplification. But while Nabokov’s temperament is antipodal to his fellow writers in so many other ways, it is exactly the same when it comes to the folding green. He does care about money, as his publisher at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, who offhandedly said much the same thing as Mailer, found out when Nabokov packed up his books and his prestige for a better deal at McGraw-Hill. Born into an immensely rich St. Petersburg family—he inherited the equivalent of two million dollars from an uncle when he was still in his teens—he lost almost everything to the Bolsheviks and was too poor too long not to watch every penny now.
“If you ever do go back,” I continued, “where will you live?”
“California,” he said, without a moment’s reflection. “California is one of my favorite states. I like the climate, the flora and the fauna—the butterfly fauna. And it’s close to Mexico and Alaska. I have never been to Alaska, unfortunately. It is the best place for butterflies.”
“Which part of California would you go to?”
“I like it all. I love Los Angeles, where we lived while I was writing the screenplay of Lolita. I had never seen jacaranda trees before, at least in bloom.” He turned to his wife. “Do you remember, darling? There was a whole street lined with jacarandas.” Still, despite the jacarandas and the Alaskan butterflies, I doubt they will ever return to America, at least to live, and my impression was that the Nabokovs feel the United States has become a dangerous shoot-em-up jungle in the decade and half since they left. On their trips through the West, Véra used to hide a Browning handgun in a glove compartment of their Buick. But she would probably not be so quick on the draw nowadays. They asked me where it is safe in America, quizzing me about their favorite spots in the West. Nabokov finally ended his list in Colorado, asking me earnestly if a place like Colorado Springs, so beautiful, so serene, so safe when they knew it, were still acceptable.
Celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this year, the Nabokovs seem to have refined their marriage into a work of art, the structure of which is, like one of those complicated Spenserian sonnets, nimble and formal at the same time. While Nabokov spins his arachnoid tales across his little index cards, Véra manages all of his business, negotiates with people who want to see him, and generally tries to keep distant the niggling, nagging problems that bedevil so many other writers. Edmund Wilson, in Upstate, thought that she was too protective, an opinion that further evoked Nabokov’s outrage. But most people feel that the Nabokovs’ is a totally admirable partnership. Most of his books are dedicated simply, “To Véra,” and she seems the model for the last, perfect wife of the narrator in Look at the Harlequins!, his autumnal and in many ways his most personal novel so far. “They have always had an ideal marriage,” one of their acquaintances, not otherwise an admirer, told me. “There has never even been a hint of anyone else.”
Their conversation, to return to the sonnet comparison, often has a kind of formulary, interlocking rhyme. One will begin a story, and the other will correct it, add to it, or give it a twist the originator had ignored or forgotten. I asked Nabokov, for example, whether he had anything to do with a fellow émigré, Solzhenitsyn, across the Alps in Zurich. Yes, he replied, he was very friendly with Solzhenitsyn. “Just by letter,” Véra interjected. “You’ve never met him.” Well, Nabokov said, looking a little abashed, their letters had been very friendly. “He just replied to one of yours,” she told him. At another point, I asked Nabokov if he were read in the Soviet Union. “Yes, very much so,” he said proudly. “My books are constantly smuggled into Russia. They consider me to be a Russian writer who has been kidnapped by the United States and forced to write in English.” To which Véra, referring to the presumably jocular part about kidnapping, appended quietly for my sake: “You can take that with a grain of salt.” These interchanges were like a good-humored duet, like Hermione Gingold reminding Maurice Chevalier in the movie Gigi that she had worn blue, not white, and that the sky had been clear, not rainy, the night th
ey had parted.
One of Nabokov’s funniest stories was on himself, and he told it with considerable pleasure. Before he was hired by Cornell, he said, he was invited up to Dartmouth to give a lecture and to be looked over in the process. Everything went perfectly. The friend who had issued the invitation met him and Véra when they arrived, brought together a small, congenial group for dinner before the lecture, then escorted the party to the auditorium—where there was an audience of three. This friend had remembered all of the duties of host but had forgotten to announce the lecture. “‘At least,’ the fellow said, looking at the room’s little trio, ‘they are well distributed.’” Nabokov repeated the punch line with glee, then added half a one of his own. “The only interesting thing that happened was during the dinner beforehand, when one of the guests kicked his wife under the table.” Véra, following his invisible and seemingly unintentional cue, finished the line. “Not under the table, dear. It was out in the open. That is what made it interesting.” Turning to me, she added: “She was flirting with my husband, and her husband didn’t like it.” Nabokov chuckled, admitting the point. “They had been studying wolves in the Arctic for two years, and she needed intellectual stimulation.”
The Nabokovs’ gentle play of point-counterpoint works both ways, however. Scarcely had Véra started her own anecdote about “four beautiful women” than Nabokov interrupted her. “No, darling,” he said patiently. “They were not beautiful women. They were men dressed as women. That is the point of that story.”
After dinner we went back to the lounge where we had begun our conversation in the afternoon and now continued it over some glasses of grappa. Once again we turned to writers and writing.
“When I last saw my good friend Edmund Wilson, who was sitting in your chair, I asked him who the best writer in America was,” Nabokov began. “He said there was only one—James Baldwin.” He smiled and sat back in his chair like a prosecuting attorney who had just concluded a triumphant case, Baldwin obviously not being one of Nabokov’s favorites.
“Wilson was a smart man,” I said. “He should have known better.”
“He was not a smart man,” Nabokov insisted. “He had many soft spots. He would turn up with a worthless story by Gogol and say that it was the best thing in Russian literature. It was all rather endearing.”
“Whom do you most admire,” I asked, repeating one of the questions I had sent him, without getting, as his written reply shows, a very explicit response.
“Edmund White. He wrote Forgetting Elena. He’s a marvelous writer. I’m also a great admirer of John Updike—the up, up, up Updike. J. D. Salinger is another writer I admire tremendously. Beautiful stuff! He’s a real writer. I like some of Truman Capote’s stuff, particularly In Cold Blood. Except for that impossible end, so sentimental, so false. But there are scenes in which he writes with true appetite, and he presents them very well.”
Over our second glass of grappa, Nabokov looked at his watch and began his goodbyes. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “It is way past my bedtime. Why, it is almost dawn!”
It was ten minutes after ten.
Vladimir Nabokov on the Loose
Hugh A. Mulligan / 1977
From The Washington Star, January 16, 1977. © The Estate of Hugh A. Mulligan. Reprinted by permission.
Vladimir Nabokov, the dazzling stylist whom John Updike, among other critics, regards as the greatest living American writer, admits to being a kept man these past twenty-five years.
Since 1952, when he first studied her gum-chewing charms and “drip” and “goon”-strewn slang on bus rides around Ithaca, New York, the reclusive novelist has lived off Lolita. The tantalizing, shocking, “disgustingly conventional” American adolescent whose subspecies he classified under the word “nymphet,” adding a new erotic noun to the language, has made him more famous than the moth and two butterflies named for him as a world-renowned lepidopterist.
“Between the age limits of nine and fourteen,” Nabokov’s stricken hero, Humbert Humbert, describes the species, “there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (this is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets.’”
Although the film was only a minor success and the musical by Alan J. Lerner went nowhere, Nabokov is pleased as any parent that his little girl has behaved so well in translation and paperback and hardcover and as a rapidly accepted noun herself—“Lolita: a sexually attractive young girl” (Webster’s)—in the English language.
There have since been other novels, Pale Fire and Ada, and a brilliant autobiography, Speak, Memory, to bolster his reputation as the most original English prose stylist since Joyce. As a Russian novelist he is measured with Pasternak (whom he abhors) and Solzhenitsyn (whom he greatly admires), but Lolita has been faithful in her fabulous fashion.
“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure novelist with an unpronounceable name,” says Nabokov, who will be seventy-eight in April and has lived in lonely luxury in a deluxe hotel suite overlooking Lake Geneva since 1961, but with characteristic alliteration regards himself as “American as April in Arizona.”
Proudly, with a patrician glare around the surrounding Alps at his film star neighbors, he proclaims that he is not a tax exile.
“I pay US income taxes on every cent I earn at home and abroad,” he says with patriotic ardor, admitting that at times the tax bill is “so high as to obscure the view from my easy chair.” He has not yet computed what the new law reducing exemptions for Americans abroad will do to his royalty statements.
Driven out of Imperial Russia by the Bolsheviks and from Berlin and Paris by the Nazis, leaving behind a fortune, his beloved native language and, on each occasion, priceless butterfly collections, Nabokov loves America with an immigrant’s fervor and forgiveness.
America, he says, “is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home.”
He broke the glacial silence of his Alpine retreat to rent a television set and watch the astronauts land on the moon. “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,” he exulted. “It was also a moment when a flag means more to one than a flag usually means.”
In a rare response to the critics, whom he dismisses as “hacks and hicks,” he issued a thunderbolt from his six-room atelier on the top floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel here: “Whether or not the critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent, but I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America.”
A half century ago in a debate at Cambridge University, Nabokov gave his last political speech, denouncing the Russian police state, to which he never has returned. But he lost the day to the “Soviet apologist on The Guardian.”
His political outlook has “remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of heads of government should not exceed postage stamp size. No torture and no executions. With the passing of years I grow less and less interested in Russia and more and more indifferent to the once-harrowing thought that my books would remain banned there as long as my contempt for the police state and political oppression prevented me from entertaining the vaguest thought of return.”
But he takes sly delight in the knowledge that Lolita, which he himself translated into Russian, has been smuggled in for the decadence of the comrades.
Aloof as Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, who lived just down the road, and sharing the same social circle of “tufted ducks and crested globes on Geneva’s lake,” Nabokov is content with the company of his books and Véra, his wife of fifty years, to whom all his novels are dedicated. It was Véra who rescued the manuscript of
Lolita from a backyard incinerator in faculty row at Cornell University, where he was a funny, flamboyant lecturer teaching a course in masterpieces of European fiction that the football players who flocked to it called “Dirty Lit.”
After the novel’s success, the professor resigned, choosing Switzerland for its “exquisite postal service, no bothersome demonstrations, also butterflies and fabulous sunsets.”
The émigré novelist who wrote his first book “on the moth-eaten couch of a German boarding house” and has been living the semi-permanent life of an exile ever since in motels, hotels, furnished flats and homes rented from professors on sabbatical, now prefers the transient glories of one of Europe’s poshest hotels because “it simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership and confirms me in my favorite habit, freedom.”
Or, as he explained on another occasion, “I propelled myself out of Russia with such indignant force that I have been rolling madly on ever since.”
Nabokov was born on a country estate fifty miles from St. Petersburg in 1899, the same year as Hemingway. His first novel in Russian, Mashenka [Mary], was published in 1926, the same year as Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. His father, a jurist, liberal politician and member of the first Russian parliament, was ruined by the revolution, went into exile in 1919 and was assassinated in Berlin “by fascist thugs while trying to shield his friend, Professor Milyukin.” Osip, his father’s valet, was shot “by the Bolshevik’s for appropriating the family bicycles instead of turning them over to the state.”
Bilingual in English and Russian from his earliest infancy and adding French at five, Nabokov was educated by a series of tutors who taught him chess, boxing, tennis and encouraged his demon: butterfly hunting. His first published works were in English, a poem called “Remembrance,” in the 1919 issue of the Trinity College, Cambridge, literary magazine, and in the same year a learned paper on Crimean butterflies.
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 28