Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  Nine novels in Russian under the pseudonym V. Sirin followed before, at forty-one, he came to America and resumed writing in English, which he found “exceedingly painful, like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.”

  He fondly recalls the “blessed day in 1939” when a fellow émigré writer in Berlin asked him to take his place lecturing on Slavic languages at Stanford University. Sergei Rachmaninoff sent him off with a carton of old clothes. Nabokov moved east to lecture on literature at Wellesley and take a parttime job as a lepidopterist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Meticulous about his English, as he remains to this day—he still hates to “speak off the Nabocuff”—he wrote out and read one hundred lectures on novelists from Jane Austen to James Joyce and one hundred on Russian Literature. He used the same technique at Cornell, where his classes had an enrollment of more than four hundred and Véra corrected his examination papers.

  A chess master, whose hobbies include composing chess problems, making up crossword puzzles in Russian and playing “Skrebl,” which is Scrabble in a Cyrillac alphabet, the émigré professor never could understand the intricacies of American football.

  “I don’t belong to any club or group,” Nabokov once described himself to a BBC interviewer. “I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts or take part in demonstrations.”

  He doesn’t drive, either.

  Véra was at the wheel for the nationwide butterfly hunts that led to the discovery of Nabokov’s pug, “a little American moth named after me,” on the window of a Utah hunting lodge. Those hunts also netted the splendid details of motels and roadside cafes for Humbert Humbert’s cross-country debauch with Lolita. The book passed through his Cornell days like a dream. He still remembers the innocent coeds coming up asking him to autograph gift copies for their fathers and grandfathers.

  Shunned by shocked American publishers, Lolita ignominiously came to print in Paris at the hands of the Olympia Press, whose titles included White Thighs and The Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe. Graham Greene discovered it, called it one of the three best books he had read all year and Lolita was on her way. Still among the most sensuous, illicit stories ever told, the book does not have a single four-letter word.

  Nabokov, a gentle, benign man of Olympian opinions, dismisses D. H. Lawrence as “a pornographer,” prefers Hemingway to Conrad (with whom to his horror he is often compared as the master of a second language) and has “the deepest admiration for H. G. Wells.”

  He speaks of “not quite first-rate Eliot and definitely second-rate Pound.” His list of “formidable mediocrities” includes Camus, Lorca, Gorky, Faulkner, Balzac, Brecht, Stendhal, Galsworthy, Thomas Wolfe, and E. M. Forster.

  He detests “the four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro, but the first takes the fig.” Freud to Nabokov is always “the Viennese quack.”

  Nabokov cherishes Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov, against whom his writings in Russian often are measured. He likes Proust, Kafka, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Keats, Browning, J. D. Salinger, and John Updike. As “an English child brought up by governesses,” he has an abiding affection for Lewis Carroll—“He has a pathetic affinity to Humbert Humbert”—and translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian.

  Nabokov does all his writing in pencil on large index cards while standing at a lectern “which faces a bright corner of the room instead of the bright audiences of my professorial days.” Ada covered 2,500 cards.

  Recovering from a five-month bout with bronchial pneumonia, he has done most of his recent writing in bed, which has slowed down the start of his new novel, The Original of Laura. He is also getting together a volume of correspondence with Edmund Wilson, another early champion.

  “Generally,” he says, “I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy a year.”

  Nabokov likes sunbaths on the hotel lawn, walking along the lake, a “triangular gulp of canned beer,” and keeping up with American slang through the flocks of magazines, newspapers, and book reviews that flutter into his pigeonhole in the hotel lobby.

  Sadly, he has not gone butterfly hunting since July, 1975, when he skidded on wet grass in an Alpine valley near Davos and had to suffer jeers and laughter from the passengers in a passing cable car when he called for help. He still dreams about the incident and his injuries and the memory of an uncle who died at Davos.

  On the day of this rare interview, Nabokov was in high spirits. Winter was drawing a white shade down the bleak mountains as the snow line approached the lake, and his son, Dmitri, a professional opera singer with a powerful bass voice, was singing Figaro in the bathroom. He was surprised that Carter had won the election but didn’t think life would change much in his beloved America. Russia, he mused, was the same as he had left it, the same muzhik flailing the same horse, all bones, with the same whip.

  “Nobody can decide,” he once said, “if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer or an ageless intellectual freak.”

  Then with typical gusto, he summed up himself: “I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature before spending fifteen years in Germany.”

  Vladimir Off the Nabocuff

  Hugh A. Mulligan: What is the Nabokov diet these days, both literary and caloric?

  Vladimir Nabokov: My caloric diet usually consists of bread and butter, transparent honey, wine, roast duck with red whortleberry jam, and similar plain fare. (Whortleberries are a kind of wild cranberry, also known as Lingonberries.) My literary regime is more fancy, but two hours of meditation, between two A.M. and four A.M. (when the effect of a first sleeping pill evaporates and that of a second one has not begun) and a spell of writing in the afternoon, are about all my new novel needs.

  HAM: Somewhere I read that you have never flown across the Atlantic. Do long distance flights frighten or bore you, and does the phasing out of the passenger liners account for your fewer trips to America?

  VN: The first ascent I made took place in a small cheap plane over Margate, Kent, in 1920. Nowadays my flights are limited to delightful hops from Montreux to Nice and back again. I shall certainly enjoy flying across the Atlantic when the last luxurious liner is extinct.

  HAM: There was, I believe, a recent exchange of letters between you and Solzhenitsyn. What was the gist of them?

  VN: I praised the freedom and happiness of the West; he deplored the fact of his children not being able to get a Russian education abroad.

  HAM: You have said, “America is the only country in which I feel mentally and emotionally at home.” After the jolts and flaws of lost Vietnam and the self-flagellating Watergate, do you worry about the future of America?

  VN: Political squabbles and awkward wars will soon be forgotten. Let us prepare new weapons and whistle softly as we work. Let me write my new novel in peace. This is my work, my duty. America does not need my worrying about her. The jitters I leave to other countries, and the worse they are the better.

  HAM: On the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution you wrote An Anniversary, proclaiming ten years of contempt for the Soviet police state and celebrating ten years of freedom from it. The sixtieth anniversary is at hand this year. In the intervening half-century, has your contempt diminished? Is there less freedom outside Russia to celebrate?

  VN: My contempt for tyranny shall last forever. Things hidden from tourists—the terrible backwoods, the jails, the concentration camps—cannot be compensated by a few more motor cars, stale sugar buns in redecorated shops, or the new fad—artificial caviar. And thus it will remain until that dreary and diabolical regime is destroyed.

  HAM: Steam shovels, according to an A.P. report, are biting into Peking’s Square of Heavenly Peace for a mausoleum to Mao Tse-Tung. What is your opinion of the late chairman as a person and a poet? I take it that you did not share the reporte
d world grief at his passing?

  VN: Epitaph:

  Not a thing do I know about him

  I’m not even sure he could swim

  HAM: Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time has been both praised for her courage in standing up to (Sen. Joseph) McCarthy and criticized for its myopia toward the evils of Soviet Communism. When you were at Cornell did you come under any pressure from the McCarthy committee or was there equal pressure to conform with the leftist academics?

  VN: Throughout my ten years’ stay in Cornell I was never subjected to any pressure either from left or right.

  (At both Harvard and Cornell, however, Nabokov resolutely refused to sign any faculty resolutions or join any demonstrations regardless of the cause.)

  HAM: You once gave your preference for celestial neighbors—Shakespeare laughing ribaldly at frying Freud. Does this indicate a belief in the hereafter and an insight into or resumption of your own future booking arrangements?

  VN: No. An infinite comic strip would soon become a dreadful bore.

  HAM: I am in the process of polishing, dusting and perhaps even demolishing some of the statuary in my personal pantheon. Would you assist, please, with some pumice or a hammer for Willa Cather, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Mauriac, and Capote?

  VN: Mauriac has written some wonderful stuff (e.g. Le Noeud de Viperes). Are we sure you have not confused him with the execrable Malraux? Waugh had talent. The scene of the murder in Capote is great. You must have invented Willa Cather and I don’t remember anything of Fitzgerald’s writings.

  (Nabokov administered the hammer to Miss Cather with an innocent smile, claiming honestly never to have heard of her. His wife and lifelong proofreader gently rebuked his lapse, and he could not be drawn into mitigating sentence on Fitzgerald.)

  HAM: Will the new US income tax law for Americans living and working abroad drive you up the wall and out of Switzerland? (Nabokov has always made it his patriotic duty to pay full US income taxes on all his earnings at home and abroad.)

  VN: I have not yet tried to compute what the new tax law in all its glory will cost me.

  A Blush of Color—Nabokov in Montreux

  Robert Robinson / 1977

  From The Listener, March 24, 1977. © Immediate Media Co. Reprinted by permission.

  Robert Robinson: First, sir, to spare you irritation, I wonder if you will instruct me in the pronunciation of your name.

  Vladimir Nabokov: Let me put it this way. There exists a number of deceptively simple-looking Russian names whose spelling and pronunciation present the foreigner with strange traps. The name Suvarov took a couple of centuries to lose the preposterous middle “a”—it should be Suvorov. American autograph-seekers, while professing a knowledge of all my books—prudently not mentioning their titles—re-juggle the vowels of my name in all the ways allowed by mathematics. “Nabakav” is especially touching for the “a”s. Pronunciation problems fall into a less erratic pattern. On the playing-fields of Cambridge, my football team used to hail me as “Nabkov” or facetiously, “Macnab.” New Yorkers reveal their tendency of turning “o” into “ah” by pronouncing my name “Nabarkov.” The aberration, “Nabokov,” is a favorite one of postal officials; now the correct Russian way would take too much time to explain, and so I’ve settled for the euphonious “Nabokov,” with the middle syllable accented and rhyming with “smoke.” Would you like to try?

  RR: Mr. NabOkov.

  VN: That’s right.

  RR: You grant interviews on the understanding that they shall not be spontaneous. This admirable method ensures there will be no dull patches. Can you tell me why and when you decided upon it?

  VN: I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect—or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

  RR: You’ve been a writer all your life. Can you evoke for us the earliest stirring of the impulse?

  VN: I was a boy of fifteen, the lilacs were in full bloom; I had read Pushkin and Keats; I was madly in love with a girl of my age; I had a new bicycle (an Enfield, I remember) with reversible handlebars that could turn it into a racer. My first poems were awful, but then I reversed those handlebars, and things improved. It took me, however, ten more years to realize that my true instrument was prose—poetic prose, in the special sense that it depended on comparisons and metaphors to say what it wanted to say. I spent the years 1925 to 1940 in Berlin, Paris, and the Riviera, after which I took off for America. I cannot complain of neglect on the part of any great critics, although as always and everywhere there was an odd rascal or two badgering me. What has amused me in recent years is that those old novels and stories, published in English in the sixties and seventies, were appreciated much more warmly than they had been in Russian thirty years ago.

  RR: Has your satisfaction in the act of writing ever fluctuated? I mean, is it keener now or less keen than once it was?

  VN: Keener.

  RR: Why?

  VN: Because the ice of experience now mingles with the fire of inspiration.

  RR: Apart from the pleasure it brings, what do you conceive your task as a writer to be?

  VN: This writer’s task is the purely subjective one of reproducing as closely as possible the image of the book he has in his mind. The reader need not know, or, indeed, cannot know, what the image is, and so cannot tell how closely the book has conformed to its image in the author’s mind. In other words, the reader has no business bothering about the author’s intentions, nor has the author any business trying to learn whether the consumer likes what he consumes.

  RR: Of course, the author works harder than the reader does; but I wonder whether it augments his—this is to say, your—pleasure that he makes the reader work hard, too.

  VN: The author is perfectly indifferent to the capacity and condition of the reader’s brain.

  RR: Could you give us some idea of the pattern of your working day?

  VN: This pattern has lately become blurry and inconstant. At the peak of the book, I worked all day, cursing the tricks that objects play upon me, the mislaid spectacles, the spilled wine. I also find talking of my working day far less entertaining than I formerly did.

  RR: The conventional view of an hotel is as of a temporary shelter—one brings one’s own luggage, after all—yet you choose to make it permanent.

  VN: I have toyed on and off with the idea of buying a villa. I can imagine the comfortable furniture, the efficient burglar alarms, but I am unable to visualize an adequate staff. Old retainers require time to get old, and I wonder how much of it there still is at my disposal.

  RR: You once entertained the possibility of returning to the United States. I wonder if you will.

  VN: I will certainly return to the United States at the first opportunity. I’m indolent, I’m sluggish, but I’m sure I’ll go back with tenderness. The thrill with which I think of certain trails in the Rockies is only matched by visions of my Russian woods, which I will never revisit.

  RR: Is Switzerland a place with positive advantages for you, or is it simply a place without positive disadvantages?

  VN: The winters can be pretty dismal here, and my old borzoi has developed feuds with lots of local dogs, but otherwise it’s all right.

  RR: You think and write in three languages—which would be the preferred one?

  VN: Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. The matter of preference does not really arise. Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language. During the second part of my life, it was generally English, my own brand of English—not the Cambridge variety, but still English.

  RR: At any point do you invite your wife to comment on work in progress?

  VN: When the book is quite finished, and its fair copy is still warm and wet, my wife goes carefully through it. Her comments are usually few but invar
iably to the point.

  RR: Do you find that you reread your own earlier work, and if you do, with what feelings?

  VN: Rereading my own works is a purely utilitarian business. I have to do it when correcting a paperback edition riddled with misprints or controlling a translation, but there are some rewards. In certain species—this is going to be a metaphor—in certain species, the wings of the pupated butterfly begin to show in exquisite miniature through the wing-cases of the chrysalis a few days before emergence. It is the pathetic sight of an iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties. Suddenly, through a drab photograph, a blush of color, an outline of form seems to be distinguishable. I’m saying this with absolute scientific modesty, not with the smugness of aging art.

  RR: Which writers are you currently reading with pleasure?

  VN: I’m rereading Rimbaud, his marvelous verse and his pathetic correspondence in the Pléiade edition. I am also dipping into a collection of unbelievably stupid Soviet jokes.

  RR: Your praise for Joyce and Wells has been high. Could you identify briefly the quality in each which sets them apart?

  VN: Joyce’s Ulysses is set apart from all modern literature, not only by the force of his genius, but also by the novelty of his form. Wells is a great writer, but there are many writers as great as he.

  RR: Your distaste for the theories of Freud has sometimes sounded to me like the agony of one betrayed, as though the old magus had once fooled you with his famous three-card trick. Were you ever a fan?

  VN: What a bizarre notion! Actually, I always loathed the Viennese quack. I used to stalk him down dark alleys of thought, and now we shall never forget the sight of old, flustered Freud seeking to unlock his door with the point of his umbrella.