Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Did you only enjoy American films?

  No. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [1928] was superb, and I loved the French films of Rene Clair — Sousles Toits de Paris [1929], Le Million [1931], A Nous la Liberte [1931] — a new world, a new trend in cinema.

  A brilliant but self-effacing critic and scholar has described Invitation to a Beheading [ 1935-36] as Zamiatin's We restaged by the Marx Brothers. Is it fair to say that Invitation to a Beheading is in many ways akin to the film comedies we've been talking about?*

  [*Nabokov's novels abound in the slapstick elements, the cosmic sight gags, as it were, of Keaton, Clair, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. Pale Fire's kingdom of Zembla recalls the funhouse palace of Duck Soup(1933), with its ludicrous functionaries, uniformed guards and mirror walls, as well as the sequence in A Night at the Opera in which, managed by Groucho, the others disguise themselves as the three identically bearded Russian aviators, Chicoski, Harpotski, and Baronof. Witness Kinbote in Pale Fire, as King Charles, modestly «lecturing] under an assumed name and in a heavy makeup, with wig and false whiskers» (his real, immense, Americangrown beard will earn him his sobriquet, The Great Beaver), or the vision of him making his escape from Zembla, abetted by a hundred loyalists who, in a brilliant diversionary ploy, don red caps and sweaters identical to the King's, in their apprehension packing the local prison, which is «much too small for more kings» (shades of A. Might at the Opera's crowded cabin!). The activities of The Shadows, that regicidal organization of stooges, recall Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops, and The Shadows' grotesque, bumbling, but lethal agent, assassin Gradus, is a vaudevillian, jetage Angel of Death, imagined as «always streaking across the sky with black traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained glide high over sea and land». And in The Defense (1930), Luzhin's means of suicide is suggested to him by a movie still, lying on a table, showing «a whitefaced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper — just about to fall off into the abyss» — the most famous scene in Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (1923). I trust you have enjoyed this note, to paraphrase a comment made by Kinbote under very different circumstances.]

  I can't make the comparison between a visual impression and my scribble on index cards, which I always see first when I think of my novels. The verbal part of the cinema is such a hodgepodge of contributions, beginning with the script, that it really has no style of its own. On the other hand, the viewer of a silent film has the opportunity of adding a good deal of his own inner verbal treasure to the silence of the picture.

  Although parts were eventually discarded or revised by Stanley Kubrick, you nevertheless did write the original screenplay for Lolita. Why?

  I tried to give it some kind of form which would protect it from later intrusions and distortions. In the case of Lolita I included quite a number of scenes that I had discarded from the novel but still preserved in my desk. You mention one of those scenes in The Annotated Lolita — Humbert's arrival in Ramsdale at the charred ruins of the McCoo house. My complete screenplay of Lolita, all deletions and emendations restored, will be published by McGrawHill in the near future; I want it out before the musical version.

  The musical version?

  You look disapproving. It's in the best of hands: Alan Jay Lerncr will do the adaptation and lyrics, John Barry the music, with settings by Boris Aronson.

  I notice that you didn't include W. C. Fields among your favorites. For some reason his films did not play in Europe and I never saw any in the States, either.

  Well, Fields' comedy is more eminently American than the others, less exportable, I suppose. To move from movies to stills, I’ve noticed that photography is seen negatively (no pun intended, no pun!) in books such as Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading. Are you making a by now traditional distinction between mechanical process and artistic inspiration?

  No, I do not make that distinction. The mechanical process can exist in a ludicrous daub, and artistic inspiration can be found in a photographer's choice of landscape and in his manner of seeing it.

  You once told me that you were born a landscape painter. Which artists have meant the most to you?

  Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters. And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent enthusiasms.

  The process of reading and rereading your novels is a kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic trompe l'oeil, and in several novels (Pale Fire and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil painting. Would you say something about the pleasures inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?

  A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his squiggles to epater Philistines does not have the talent or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a nail.

  What about Cubistic collage? That's a kind of trompe l'oeil.

  No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from all art, be it letters or the little music I know.

  The art teacher in Pnin says that Picasso is supreme, despite his commercial foibles. Kinbote in Pale Fire likes him too, gracing his rented house with «a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse», and your Kinbotish questioner recalls a reproduction of Picasso's Chandelier, pot et casserole emaillee on your writing desk, 1966 (the same one Kinbote had up on his wall during his reign as King Charles). Which aspects of Picasso do you admire?

  The graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet colors. But then, starting with Guernica, his production leaves me indifferent. The aspects of Picasso that I emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist 1 do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolitalike creatures, is Balthus.

  How are you progressing with your book on the butterfly in art?

  I am still working, at my own pace, on an illustrated Butterflies in Art work, from Egyptian antiquity to the Renaissance. It is a purely scientific pursuit. I find an entomological thrill in tracking down and identifying the butterflies represented by old painters. Only recognizable portraits interest me. Some of the problems that might be solved are: were certain species as common in ancient times as they are today? Can the minutiae of evolutionary change be discerned in the pattern of a five-hundred-year-old wing? One simple conclusion I have come to is that no matter how precise an Old Master's brush can be it cannot vie in artistic magic with some of the colored plates drawn by the illustrators of certain scientific works in the nineteenth century. An Old Master did not know that in different species the venation is different and never bothered to examine its structure. It is like painting a hand without knowing anything about its bones or indeed without suspecting it has any. Certain impressionists cannot afford to wear glasses. Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance. In high art and pure science detail is everything.

  Who are some of the artists who rendered butterflies? Might they not attribute more symbolism to the insect than you do?

  Among the many Old Masters who depicted butterflies (obviously netted, or more exactly capped, by their apprentices in the nearest garden) were Hieronymous Bosch (14501516), Jan Brueghel (15681625), Albrecht Durer (14711528), Paolo Porpora (16171673), Daniel Seghers (15901661), and many others. The insect depicted is either part of a still-life (flowers or fruit) arrangement, or more strikingly a live detail in a conventional religious picture (Durer, Francesco di Gentile, etc.). That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.

  In 1968 you told me you hoped to travel to various European museums for research purposes. Have you been doing that?

  Yes, that's one reason we've been spending so much time in Italy, and in the future will be traveling to Paris and the Louvre, and to the Dutch museums. We've been to small towns in Italy, and to Florence, Venice, Rome, Mila
no, Naples, and Pompeii, where we found a very badly drawn butterfly, long and thin, like a Mayfly. There are certain obstacles: still-lifes are not very popular today, they are gapfillers, generally hanging in dark places or high up. A ladder may be necessary, a flashlight, a magnifying glass! My object is to identify such a picture if there are butterflies in it (often it's only «Anonymous» or «School of____), and get an efficient person to take a photograph.

  Since I don't find many of those pictures in the regular display rooms I try to find the curator because some pictures may turn up in their stacks. It takes so much time: I tramped through the Vatican Museum in Rome and found only one butterfly, a Zebra Swallowtail, in a quite conventional Madonna and Child by Gentile, as realistic as though it were painted yesterday. Such paintings may throw light on the time taken for evolution; one thousand years could show some little change in trend. It's an almost endless pursuit, but if I could manage to collect at least one hundred of these things I would publish reproductions of those particular paintings which include butterflies, and enlarge parts of the picture with the butterfly in life-size. Curiously, the Red Admirable is the most popular; I've collected twenty examples.

  That particular butterfly appears frequently in your own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on John Shades arm the minute before he is killed, the insect appears in King, Queen Knave just after you've withdrawn the authorial omniscience — killing the characters, so to speak — and in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, you recall having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of Vanessa atalanta?

  Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to Northern Russia, where it was called «The Butterfly of Doom» because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the underside of its two hind wings seem to read «1881». The Red Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many other migratory butterflies.

  The painters you admire are for the most part realists, yet it would not be altogether fair to call you a «realist». Should one find this paradoxical? Or does the problem derive from nomenclature?

  The problem derives from pigeonholing.

  Your youngmanhood coincides with the experimental decade in Russian painting. Did you follow these developments closely at the time, and what were (are) your feelings about, say, Malevich, Kandinsky, or, to choose a more representational artist, Chagall?

  I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my boyhood — Somov, Benois (Peter Ustinov's uncle, you know), Vrubel, Dobuzhinski,*[ *Who, ca. 1912-13, was young Nabokov's drawing master; see Speak, Memory, pp. 92-94, and 236] etc. Malevich and Kandinsky mean nothing to me and I have always found Chagall's stuff intolerably primitive and grotesque.

  Always?

  Well, relatively early works such as The Green Jew and The Promenade have their points, but the frescoes and windows he now contributes to temples and the Parisian Opera House plafond are coarse and unbearable.

  What of Tchelitchew, whose Hide and Seek (another version of Speak, Memory's Find What the Sailor Has Hidden?) in part describes the experience of reading one of your novels?

  I know Tchelitchew's work very little.

  The latter artist recalls the Ballets Russes. Were you at all acquainted with that circle, painters as well as dancers and musicians?

  My parents had many acquaintances who painted and danced and made music. Our house was one of the first where young Shalyapin sang, and I have foxtrotted with Pavlova in London half a century ago.

  Mr. Hilton Kramer, in a recent article in the Sunday New York Times (May 3, 1970) writes, «The accomplishments of at least two living artists who are widely regarded as among the greatest of their time — George Balanchine and Vladimtr Nabokov — are traceable, despite the changes of venue and language and outlook, to the esthetic dream that nourished Diaghilev and the artists he gathered around him in St. Petersburg in the nineties». This is, I suppose, what Mary McCarthy meant when she characterized Pale Fire as a «Faberge gem». Are these analogies just?

  I was never much interested in the ballet. «Faberge gems» I have dealt with in Speak, Memory (Chapter Five, p. 111).* [*There the memoirist recalls a morning tour of St. Petersburg with his governess, the majestic Mademoiselle: «We drift past the show windows of Faberge whose mineral monstrosities, jeweled troykas poised on marble ostrich eggs, and the like, highly appreciated by the imperial family, were emblems of grotesque garishness to ours.] Dalanshin, not Dalanchine (note the other mistransliterations). I am at a loss to understand why the names of most of the people with whom I am paired begin with a B.

  All of which brings to mind another outspoken emigre, Mr. Stravinsky. Have you had any associations with him?

  I know Mr. Stravinski very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print.

  Whom in Parisian literary circles did you meet in the thirties, in addition to Joyce and the editorial board of Mesures?

  I was on friendly terms with the poet Jules Supervielle. Him and Jean Pauhan (editor of Nouvelle revue frangaise) I especially remember.

  Did you know Samuel Beckett in Paris?

  No, I did not. Beckett is the author of lovely novellas and wretched plays in the Maeterlinck tradition. The trilogy is my favorite, expecially Molloy. There is an extraordinary scene in which he is crawling through a forest by dragging himself, «by catching the crook of his walking stick, his crutch, in the vegetation before him, and pulling himself up, wearing three overcoats and newspaper underneath them. Then there are those pebbles, which he is busily transferring from pocket to pocket. Everything is so gray, so uncomfortable, you feel that he is in constant bladder discomfort, as old people sometimes are in their dreams. In this abject condition there is no doubt some likeness with Kafka's physically uncomfortable and dingy men. It is that limpness that is so interesting in Beckett's work.

  Beckett has also composed in two tongues, has overseen the Englishing of his French works. In which language have you read him?

  I've read him in both French and English. Beckett's French is a schoolmaster's French, a preserved French, but in English you feel the moisture of verbal association and of the spreading live roots of his prose.

  I have a «theory» that the French translation of Despair (1939) — not to mention the books she could have read in Russian — exerted a great influence on the so-called New Novel. In his Preface to M-me. Sarraute's Portrait cTun inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists, a rather more intelligent remark — don't you think? — than his comments of eight years before when, reviewing Despair, he said that as an emigre writer — landless — you had no subject matter. «But what is the question?»you might ask at this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New Novel?

  Answer: The French New Novel does not really exist apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.

  But what do you think of Sartre's remark?

  Nothing. I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just don't know what an «antinovel» is specifically. Every original novel is «anti» because it does not resemble the genre or kind ot its predecessor.

  I know that you admire Robbe-Grillet. What about some of the others loosely grouped under the «New Novel» tag: Claude Simon? Michel Butor? and Raymond Queneau, a wonderful writer, who, while not a member of l'ecole, anticipates it in several ways?

  Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French literature.* [*Nabokov's encomium is not without humor, however, since Queneau's Exercices is an antistory, if not novel: a man is jostled on a bus and is later advised by a friend to add a button to his overcoat, and this «story», such as it is, is retold ninety-nine different times and ways, none of which is as «thrilling» as, say, an episode in James Bond] I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and
I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle revuefrancaise. We met once at a party and talked about another famous fillette. I do not care for Butor. But Robbe-Grillet is so unlike the others. One cannot, one should not lump them together. By the way, when we visited Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had dressed herself a la gamine in my honor, pretending to be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when we met again at a publisher's luncheon in a restaurant. After pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked, «Voulezvous un CocaCola, Mademoiselle?» It was very funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in his photographs, roared with laughter.

  Someone has called the New Novel «the detective story taken seriously» (there it is again, the influence of the French edition of Despair). Parodistic or not, you take it «seriously», given the number of times you've transmuted the properties of the genre. Would you say something about why you've returned to them so often?

  My boyhood passion for the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown stories may yield some twisted clue.

  You once said that Robbe-Grillet's shifts of levels belong to psychology — «psychology at its best. «Are you a psychological novelist?

  All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists, I guess. Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is Franz Hellens, a Belgian, who is very important. Do you know of him?

  No, I don't. When was he active, in which period did he write? The post-Baudelaire period*

  Nabokov is of course funning ihe academic proclivity to assign individual artists or writers to neatly, arbitrarily defined «periods», «schools», and «isms» («there is only one school, that of talent», he says), but his answer turns out to be a sound one. Baudelaire spent the last few years of his life in Belgium, and Hellens was horn there in 1881, only 14 years after Baudelaire's death. Now in his ninetieth year, Hellens does indeed embody «the postBaudelaire period». Hellens' vast oeuvre includes eight novels and fourteen volumes of verse. A 1931 volume includes a portrait drawing of him by Modigliani. His Poesie Complete was published in 1959, his most recent book, Objets, in 1966. The Nouveau Larousse Universel, Vol. I (1969), includes a brief entry on him. Nabokov has not seen Hellens for many years. In 1959 he sent Nabokov a presentation copy of his novel, Oeil-de-Dieu, warmly inscribed «To the Author of Lolita».