Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov
Page 30
RR: The world knows that you are also a lepidopterist but may not know what that involves. In the collection of butterflies, could you describe the process from pursuit to display?
VN: Only common butterflies, showy moths from the tropics, are put on display in a dusty case between a primitive mask and a vulgar abstract picture. The rare, precious stuff is kept in the glazed drawers of museum cabinets. As for pursuit, it is, of course, ecstasy to follow an undescribed beauty skimming over the rocks of its habitat, but it is also great fun to locate a new species among the broken insects in an old biscuit tin sent over by a sailor from some remote island.
RR: One can always induce a mild vertigo by recalling that Joyce might not have existed as the writer but as the tenor. Have you any sense of having narrowly missed some other role? What substitute could you endure?
VN: Oh, yes, I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings—Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada—which my heirs discover and publish.
RR: Alberto Moravia told me of his conviction that each writer writes only of one thing—has but a single obsession he continually develops. Can you agree?
VN: I have not read Alberto Moravia but the pronouncement you quote is certainly wrong in my case. The circus tiger is not obsessed by his torturer, my characters cringe as I come near with my whip. I have seen a whole avenue of imagined trees losing their leaves at the threat of my passage. If I do have any obsessions I’m careful not to reveal them in fictional form.
RR: Mr. Nabokov, thank you.
VN: You’re welcome, as we say in my adopted country.
VN—RIP
William F. Buckley Jr. / 1977
From National Review, July 22, 1977. © 1977 National Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
The cover of this magazine had gone to press when word came in that Vladimir Nabokov was dead. I am sorry—not for the impiety; sorry that VN will not see the cover, or read the verse, which he’d have enjoyed. He’d have seen this issue days ahead of most Americans because he received National Review by airmail, and had done so for several years. And when we would meet, which was every year for lunch or dinner, he never failed to express pleasure with the magazine. In February, when I last saw him, he came down in the elevator, big, hunched, with his cane, carefully observed by Véra, white-haired, with the ivory skin and delicate features and beautiful face. VN was carrying a book, which he tendered me with some embarrassment—because it was inscribed. In one of his books, a collection of interviews and random fare, given over not insubstantially to the celebration of his favorite crotchets, he had said that one of the things he never did was inscribe books.
Last year, called back unexpectedly to New York, I missed our annual reunion. Since then I had sent him my two most recent books, and about these he now expressed hospitable enthusiasm as we sat down at his table in the corner of the elegant dining room of the most adamantly unchanged hotel in Europe: I cannot imagine, for all its recent architectural modernization, that the Montreux Palace was any different before the Russian revolution.
He had been very ill, he said, and was saved by the dogged intervention of his son, Dmitri, who at the hospital ordered ministrations the poor doctors had not thought of—isn’t that right, Véra? Almost right—Véra is a stickler for precision. But he was writing again, back to the old schedule. What was that schedule? (I knew, but knew he liked to tell it.) Up in the morning about six, read the papers and a few journals, then cook breakfast for Véra in the warren of little rooms where they had lived for seventeen years. After that he would begin writing and would write all morning long, usually standing, on the cards he had specially cut to a size that suited him (he wrote on both sides, and collated them finally into books). Then a light lunch, then a walk, then a nap and, in nimbler days, a little butterfly-chasing or tennis, then back to his writing until dinner time. Seven hours of writing, and he would produce 175 words. (What words!) Then dinner, and book-reading, perhaps a game of Scrabble in Russian. A very dull life, he said chortling with pleasure, and then asking questions about America, deploring the infelicitous Russian prose of Solzhenitsyn, assuring me that I was wrong in saying he had attended the inaugural meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—he had never attended any organizational meeting of anything—isn’t that right, Véra? This time she nods her head and tells him to get on with the business of ordering from the menu. He describes with a fluent synoptic virtuosity the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupiditious publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son’s operatic career, and what am I working on now?
A novel, and you’re in it.
What was that?
You and Véra are in it. You have a daughter, and she becomes a Communist agent.
He is more amused by this than Véra, but not all that amused. Of course I’ll send it to you, I beam. He laughs—much of the time he is laughing. How long will it take you to drive to the airport in Geneva?
My taxi told me it takes “un petit heure.”
Une petite heure (he is the professor): that means fifty minutes. We shall have to eat quickly. He reminisces about his declination of my bid to go on Firing Line. It would have taken me two weeks of preparation, he says almost proudly, reminding me of his well-known rule against improvising. Every word he ever spoke before an audience had been written out and memorized, he assured me—isn’t that right, Véra? Well no, he would answer questions in class extemporaneously. Well obviously! He laughed. He could hardly program his students to ask questions to which he had the answers prepared! I demur: his extemporaneous style is fine, just fine; ah, he says, but before an audience, or before one of those … television cameras … he would freeze. He ordered a brandy, and in a few minutes we rose and he and Véra and I walked ever so slowly to the door. “As long as Western civilization survives,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the Times last Tuesday, “his reputation is safe. Indeed, he will probably emerge as one of the greatest artists our century has produced.” I said goodbye warmly, embracing Véra, taking his hand, knowing that probably I would never see again—never mind the artist—this wonderful human being.
Index
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Ada (The Texture of Time)
Adams, J. Donald
Adams, Robert M.
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Anchor Review
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August, 1914
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Nabokov, Véra (Nabokov’s wife)
Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich (Nabokov’s father)
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: background and early life; in Berlin; at Cambridge University; on censorship; on chess; on coining the word “nymphet”; at Cornell University; on education; on God; at Harvard University; on humor; on index cards; on language; as lepidopterist; on literary criticism; at Montreux Palace Hotel; in Paris; on poetry; on politics; on pornography; on pronunciation of his name; on reading; on Russia; on Russian literature; on science; on the Soviet Union; on speaking; at Stanford University; on Switzerland; on translating; at University of Salt Lake City; on the United States; at Wellesley College; on writing
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Partisan Review
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Pasternak, Boris
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Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The
Republic of the Southern Cross, The
Resurrection
Return to Peyton Place
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