Strong opinions
Vladimir Nabokov
STRONG OPINIONS. Nabokov
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The interview with Alvin Toffler originally appeared in Playboy magazine. Copyright © 1963 by Playboy. Reprinted by permission of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.
The interview with Herbert Gold and George A. Plimpton originally appeared in The Paris Review. Copyright © 1967 by The Paris Review. It is reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc., and is included in the fourth volume of Writers at Work, published by The Viking Press, Inc.
Interview with Martin Esslin copyright © 1968 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Interview with Nicholas Garnham copyright © 1968 by Nicholas Garnham. Reprinted by permission.
Interviews with Alden Whitman copyright © 1969, 1971 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Interview with James Mossman copyright © 1969 by James Mossman. Reprinted by permission of John V. Mossman.
The interview with Allene Talmey was first published in Vogue. Copyright © 1969 by The Conde Nast Publications Inc. Reprinted by permission.
Interview with Israel Shenker copyright © 1972 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
The interview with Simona Morini was first published in Vogue. Copyright © 1972 by the Conde Nast Publications Inc. Reprinted by permission.
Interview with Peter DuvalSmith and Christopher Burstall copyright © 1962 by Peter DuvalSmith. Reprinted by permission.
Portions of the interview with Martha Duffy first appeared in Time. Reprinted by permission of Time, The Weekly News-magazine; copyright © 1969 by Time Inc.
Interview with Jane Howard copyright © 1964 by Time Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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CONTENTS
Forewordxv
Interviews
Letters to Editors 209
Articles 221
FOREWORD
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. Throughout my academic ascent in America, from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright lit lectern. My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, 1 have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts. Even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft.
In these circumstances nobody should ask me to submit to an interview if by «interview» a chat between two normal human beings is implied. It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin's fan. The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions.
But the interviewer wishes to visit me. He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet. He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colorful details as can be memorized, if not actually jotted down («N. gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin). Have I the heart to cancel the cosiness? I have.
A certain excellent lotion for thinning hair is by nature of an unattractive, emulsive tint. Its makers try to correct this by adding some green color — green being meant to suggest, by cosmetological tradition, the freshness of spring, pinewoods, jade, tree frogs, and so forth. The bottle, however, has to be vigorously shaken in order to have its contents viridate; otherwise, in repose, all that shows is an inchwide green border topping the unchanged, genuine, opalescent pillar of liquid. Not shaking the bottle before use is with me a matter of principle.
Similarily, in dealing with the results of interviews as they appear on the printed page, I ignore the floating decor and keep only the basic substance. My files contain the results of some forty interviews in several languages. Only some of the American and British ones have been included here. A few of those have had to be skipped because, by a kind of awful alchemy, and not merely by a good shake, my authentic response got so hopelessly mixed with the artificial color of human interest, added by the manufacturer, as to defy separation. In other cases I have had no trouble in leaving out the wellmeant little touches (as well as the gaudiest journalistic inventions), thus gradually eliminating every element of spontaneity, all semblance of actual talk. The thing is transmuted finally into a more or less neatly paragraphed essay, and that is the ideal form a written interview should take.
My fiction allows me so seldom the occasion to air my private views that I rather welcome, now and then, the questions put to me in sudden spates by charming, courteous, intelligent visitors. In this volume, the questionandanswer section is followed by a few Letters to Editors, which are «selfexplanatory», as lawyers put it in their precise way. Finally, there is a batch of essays, all but one of which were written in America or Switzerland.
Swinburne has a shrewd comment on «the rancorous and reptile crew of poeticules who decompose into criticasters». This curious phenomenon was typical of the situation in the small literary world of the Russian emigration in Paris around 1930 when the aesthetics of Bunin, Hodasevich and one or two other outstanding authors underwent particularly nasty attacks from variously «committed» criticulcs. In those years I methodically derided the detracters of art and enjoyed tremendously the exasperation my writings caused in that clique; but translating today my numerous old essays from my difficult Russian into pedantic English and explaining nice points of former dislocation and strategy is a task of little interest either to me or the reader. The only exception I have allowed myself is the piece on Hodasevich.
In result, the present body of my occasional English prose, shorn of its long Russian shadow, seems to reflect an altogether more agreeable person than the «V. Sirin», evoked with mixed feelings by emigre memoirists, politicians, poets, and mystics, who still remember our skirmishes of the nineteenthirties in Paris. A milder, easier temper permeates today the expression of my opinions, however strong; and this is as it should be.
Vladimir Nabokov Montreux, 1973
STRONG OPINIONS. INTERVIEWS
4. Anonymous (1962)
2. BBC Television (1962)
3. Playboy (1964)
4. Life (1964)
5. TV13 NY (1965)
6. Wisconsin Studies (1967)
7. The Paris Review (1967)
8. The New York Times Book Review (1968)
9. BBC2 (1968)
10. Time (1969)
11. The New York Times (1969)
12. Sunday Times (1969)
13. BBC2 (1969)
14. Vogue (1969)
15. Now (1970)
16. The New York Times (1971)
17. The New York Times Book rew (1972)
18. Swiss Broadcast (1972?)
19. Bayerischer Rundfunk (197172)
20. Anonymous Vogue (1972)
22. Anonymous (1972)
1
On the morning of June 5, 1962, the Queen Elizabeth brought my wife and me from Cherbourg to New York for the film premiere of Lolita. On the day of our arrival three or four journalists interviewed me at the St. Regis hotel. 1 have a little cluster of names jotted down in my pocket diary but am not sure which, if any, refers to that group. The questions and answers were typed from my notes immediately after the interview.
Interviewers do not find you a p
articularly stimulating person. Why is that so?
I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.
Still there must be things that move you — likes and dislikes.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
You write everything in longhand, don't you?
Yes. I cannot type.
Would you agree to show us a sample of your rough drafts?
I'm afraid I must refuse. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one's sputum.
Do you read many new novels? Why do you laugh?
I laugh because wellmeaning publishers keep sending me — with hopeyouwilllikeitasmuchaswedo» letters — only one kind of fiction: novels truffled with obscenities, fancy words, and wouldbe weird incidents. They seem to be all by one and the same writer — who is not even the shadow of my shadow.
What is your opinion of the so-called «antinovel» in France?
I am not interested in groups, movements, schools of writing and so forth. I am interested only in the individual artist. This «antinovel» does not really exist; but there does exist one great French writer, Robbe-Grillet; his work is grotesquely imitated by a number of banal scribblers whom a phony label assists commercially.
I notice you «haw» and «er» a great deal. Is it a sign of approaching senility?
Not at all. I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
What about TV appearances?
Well (you always begin with «well» on TV), after one such appearance in London a couple of years ago I was accused by a naive critic of squirming and avoiding the camera. The interview, of course, had been carefully rehearsed. I had carefully written out all my answers (and most of the questions), and because I am such a helpless speaker, I had my notes (mislaid since) on index cards arranged before me — ambushed behind various innocent props; hence I could neither stare at the camera nor leer at the questioner.
Yet you have lectured extensively
In 1940, before launching on my academic career in America, I fortunately took the trouble of writing one hundred lectures — about 2,000 pages — on Russian literature, and later another hundred lectures on great novelists from Jane Austen to James Joyce. This kept me happy at Wellesley and Cornell for twenty academic years. Although, at the lectern, I evolved a subtle up and down movement of my eyes, there was never any doubt in the minds of alert students that I was reading, not speaking.
When did you start writing in English?
I was bilingual as a baby (Russian and English) and added French at five years of age. In my early boyhood all the notes I made on the butterflies I collected were in English, with various terms borrowed from that most delightful magazine The Entomologist. It published my first paper (on Crimean butterflies) in 1920. The same year I contributed a poem in English to the Trinity Magazine, Cambridge, while I was a student there (19191922). After that in Berlin and in Paris I wrote my Russian books — poems, stories, eight novels. They were read by a reasonable percentage of the three million Russian emigres, and were of course absolutely banned and ignored in Soviet Russia. In the middle thirties I translated for publication in English two of my Russian novels, Despair and Camera Obscura (retitled Laughter in the Dark in America). The first novel that I wrote directly in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1939 in Paris. After moving to America in 1940, I contributed poems and stories to The Atlantic and The New Yorker and wrote four novels, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962). I have also published an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951), and several scientific papers on the taxonomy of butterflies.
Would you like to talk about Lolita?
Well, no. I said everything I wanted to say about the book in the Afterword appended to its American and British editions.
Did you find it hard to write the script of Lolita?
The hardest part was taking the plunge — deciding to undertake the task. In 1959 I was invited to Hollywood by Harris and Kubrick, but after several consultations with them 1 decided I did not want to do it. A year later, in Lugano, I received a telegram from them urging me to reconsider my decision. In the meantime a kind of script had somehow taken shape in my imagination so that actually I was glad they had repeated their offer. I traveled once more to Hollywood and there, under the jacarandas, worked for six months on the thing. Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. I composed new scenes and speeches in an effort to safeguard a Lolita acceptable to me. I knew that if I did not write the script somebody else would, and I also knew that at best the end product in such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations. I have not yet seen the picture. It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance. From my seven or eight sessions with Kubrick during the writing of the script I derived the impression that he was an artist, and it is on this impression that I base my hopes of seeing a plausible Lolita on June 13th in New York.
What are you working at now?
I am reading the proofs of my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse which, with a huge commentary, will be brought out by the Bollingen Foundation in four handsome volumes of more than five hundred pages each.
Could you describe this work?
During my years of teaching literature at Cornell and elsewhere I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience of poetry. As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.
And so you preserved the fruit?
Yes. My tastes and disgusts have influenced my tenyearlong work on Eugene Onegin. In translating its 5500 lines into English I had to decide between rhyme and reason — and I chose reason. My only ambition has been to provide a crib, a pony, an absolutely literal translation of the thing, with copious and pedantic notes whose bulk far exceeds the text of the poem. Only a paraphrase «reads well»; my translation does not; it is honest and clumsy, ponderous and slavishly faithful. I have several notes to every stanza (of which there are more than 4UU, counting the variants). This commentary contains a discussion of the original melody and a complete explication of the text.
Do you like being interviewed?
Well, the luxury of speaking on one theme — oneself — is a sensation not to be despised. But the result is sometimes puzzling. Recently the Paris paper Candide had me spout wild nonsense in an idiotic setting. But I have also often met with considerable fair play. Thus Esquire printed all my corrections to the account of an interview that I found full of errors. Gossip writers are harder to keep track of, and they are apt to be very careless. Leonard Lyons made me explain why I let my wife handle motion picture transactions by the absurd and tasteless remark: «Anyone who can handle a butcher can handle a producer».
2
In midJuly, 1962, Peter DuvalSmith and Christopher Burstall came for a BBC television interview to Zermatt where I happened to be collecting that summer. The lepidoptera lived up to the occasion, so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish w
onderment with which they viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud at various spots of the mountain trail. Pictures were taken of the swarms that arose at my passage, and other hours of the day were devoted to the reproduction of the interview proper. It eventually appeared on the Bookstand program and was published in The Listener (November 22, 1962). I have mislaid the cards on which I had written my answers. I suspect that the published text was taken straight from the tape for it teems with inaccuracies. These I have tried to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech.
The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1963.
Would you ever go back to Russia:
I will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender. And anyway, the grotesque shadow of a police state will not be dispelled in my lifetime. I don't think they know my works there — oh, perhaps a number of readers exist there in my special secret service, but let us not forget that Russia has grown tremendously provincial during these forty years, apart from the fact that people there are told what to read, what to think. In America Fm happier than in any other country. It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel intellectually at home in America. It is a second home in the true sense of the word.
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