Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Could you be more specific?

  Hellens was a tall, lean, quiet, very dignified man of whom I saw a good deal in Belgium in the middle thirties when I was reading my own stuff in lecture halls for large emigre audiences. La femme partagee (1929), a novel, I like particularly, and there are three or four other books that stand out among the many that Hellens wrote. I tried to get someone in the States to publish him — Laughlin, perhaps — but nothing came of it. Hellens would get excellent reviews, was beloved in Belgium, and what friends he had in Paris tried to brighten and broaden his reputation. It is a shame that he is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.

  What you say about Hellens and Queneau is most interesting, in part because journalists always find it more «colorful» to stress your negative remarks about other writers.

  Yes, «good copy» is the phrase. As a private person, I happen to be goodnatured, straightforward, plainspoken, and intolerant of bogus art. A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on the Moon.

  And as final food for thought, sir, what is the meaning of life? [A rather blurry reproduction of Tolstoy’s photographed face follows this question in the interviewer's typescript].

  For solutions see p. 000 (thus says a MS note in the edited typescript of my Poems and Problems which I have just received). In other words: Let us wait for the page proof.

  16

  A second exchange with Alden Whitman took place in mid-April, 1971, and was reproduced, with misprints and other flaws, in The New York Times, April 23.

  You, sir, will be seventy-two in a few days, having exceeded the Biblical three score and ten. How does this feat, if tt is a feat, impress you?

  «Three score and ten» sounded, no doubt, very venerable in the days when life expectancy hardly reached one half of that length. Anyway, Petersburgan pediatricians never thought I might perform the feat you mention: a feat of lucky endurance, of paradoxically detached will power, of good work and good wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively — though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous (and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved.

  Has your life thus far come up to expectations you had for yourself as a young man?

  My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of boyhood and youth. In the first decade of our dwindling century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad, and (right epithet coining) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy. At the age of twelve my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies. Twenty-five years later I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero's father (see rny novel The Gift) to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At fifteen I visualized myself as a worldfamous author of seventy with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald.

  If birthday wishes were horses, what would yours be for yourself ?

  Pegasus, only Pegasus.

  You are, I am told, at work on a new novel. Do you have a working title? And could you give me a precis of what it is all about?

  The working title of the novel I am composing now is Transparent Things, but a precis would be an opaque shadow. The facade of our hotel in Montreux is being repainted, and I have reached the ultimate south of Portugal in an effort to find a quiet spot (pace the booming surf and rattling wind) where to write. This I do on scrambled index cards (my lexl existing already there in invisible lead) which I gradually fill in and sort out, using up in the process more pencil sharpeners than pencils; but I have spoken of this in several earlier questionnaires — a word whose spelling I have to look up every time; my traveling companion, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1970, defines, by the way, ''Quassia as derived from «Quassi», a Surinam Negro slave of the 18th century, who discovered a remedy for worms in white children. On the other hand, none of my own coinages or reapplications appears in this lexicon — neither «iridule» (a motherofpearl cloudlet in Pale Fire), nor «racemosa» (a kind of bird cherry), nor several prosodic terms such as «scud» and «tilt» (see my Commentary to Eugene Onegin).

  There has been a variety of critical reaction to Ada. Which critics, in your views, have been especially perceptive, and why?

  Except for a number of helpless little hacks who were unable to jog beyond the first chapters, American reviewers have been remarkably perceptive in regard to my most cosmopolitan and poetic novel. As to the British press, the observations of a few discerning critics were also most welcome; the buffoons turned out to be less clever than usual, whilst my regular spiritual guide, Mr. Philip Toynbee, seemed even more distressed by Ada than he had been by Pale Fire. I am bad at remembering reviews in detail, and tor the moment several mountain chains separate me from my files, but generally speaking my wife and I have long stopped stuffing clippings into forgettable boxes, instead of which an efficient secretary pastes them in huge comfortable albums, with the result that I am informed better than before of current gloss and gossip. In direct answer to your question I would say that the main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.

  Your novel Mary is having a success in the United States. What have been your feelings about seeing in print a novel of so long ago in an English version?

  In my preface to the English translation of my first Russian novel, written forty-eight years ago, I point out the nature of the similarities between the author's first love affair in 1915 and that of Ganin who recalls it as his own in the stylized world of my Mashenka. Owing perhaps to my having gone back to that young romance in my autobiography begun in the nineteen forties (that is, at the centerpoint of the span separating Mashenka from Mary), the strangeness of the present resurrection cannot help losing something of its thrill. Yet I do feel another, more abstract though no less grateful, tingle when I tell myself that destiny not only preserved a fragile find from decay and oblivion, but allowed me to last long enough to supervise the unwrapping of the mummy.

  If you were writing the «book» for Lolita as a musical comedy, what would you select as the main comic point?

  The main comic point would have been my trying to do it myself.

  17

  Israel Shenker sent me his questions on June 10, 1971, three weeks before coming to see me here in Montreux. My written answers were accurately reproduced in The New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1972. Their presentation would have been perfect had they not been interspersed with unnecessary embellishment (chitchat about living writers, for instance).

  What do you do to prepare yourself for the ordeals of life?

  Shave every morning before bath and breakfast so as to be ready to fly far at short notice.

  What are the literary virtues you seek to attain — and how?

  Mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express.

  What are the literary sins for which you could be answerable some day — and how would you defend yourself?

  Of having spared in my books too many political fools and intellectual frauds among my acquaintances. Of having been too fastidious in choosing my targets.

  What is your position in the world of letters?

  Jolly good view from up here.

  What problems are posed for you by the e
xistence of ego?

  A linguistic problem: the singular act of mimetic evolution to which we owe the fact that in Russian the word ego means “him”, “his”

  What struggles these days for pride of place in your mind?

  Meadows. A meadow with Scarce Heath butterflies in North Russia, another with Grinneirs Blue in Southern California. That sort of thing.

  What are your views about man s upward climb from slime?

  A truly remarkable performance. Pity, though, that some of the slime still sticks to drugged brains.

  What should we think about death?

  «Leave me alone, says dreary Death» (bogus inscription on empty tomb).

  What kinds of power do you favor, and which do you oppose?

  To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

  What are the large issues that you can't get interested in, and what are you most concerned with?

  The larger the issue the less it interests me. Some of my best concerns are microscopic patches of color.

  What can (should?) we do about elusive truth?

  One can (and should) engage a specially trained proofreader to make sure that misprints and omissions do not disfigure the elusive truth of an interview that a newspaper takes the trouble to conduct with an author who is rather particular about the precise reproduction of his phrase.

  18

  On September 8, 1971, Paul Sufrin came here to conduct a radio interview for Swiss Broadcast, European & Overseas Service. I do not know when, or if, our rather odd colloquy was used. Here are a few samples.

  You've been quoted as saying that in a first-rate work of fiction, the real clash isn't between the characters, but between the author and the world. Would you explain this?

  I believe I said «between the author and the reader», not «the world», which would be a meaningless formula, since a creative artist makes his own world or worlds. He clashes with rcaderdum because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lipmoving ghosts and amnesiacs. On the other hand, a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled.

  What is your particular clash?

  Well, that's the clash I am generally faced with.

  In many of your writings, you have conceived what I consider to be an Alice in Wonderland world of unreality and illusion. What is the connection with your real struggle with the world?

  Alice in Wonderland is a specific book by a definite author with its own quaintness, its own quirks, its own quiddity.

  If read very carefully, it will be seen to imply, by humorous juxtaposition, the presence of a quite solid, and rather sentimental, world, behind the semidetached dream. Moreover, Lewis Carroll liked little girls. I don't.

  The mixture of unreality and illusion may have led some people to consider you mystifying and your writing full of puzzles. What is your answer to people who say you are just plain obscure?

  To stick to the crossword puzzle in their Sunday paper.

  Do you make a point of puzzling people and playing games with readers?

  What a bore that would be!

  The past figures prominently in some of your writing. What concern do you have for the present and the future?

  My conception of the texture of time somewhat resembles its image in Part Four of Ada. The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist.

  What have you found to be the disadvantages of being able to write in so many languages?

  The inability to keep up with their ever-changing slang.

  What are the advantages?

  The ability to render an exact nuance by shifting from the language I am now using to a brief burst of French or to a soft rustle of Russian.

  What do you think of critic George Steiners linking you with Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as the three figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction?

  That playwright and that essayist are regarded nowadays with such religious fervor that in the triptych you mention, I would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful robber, though.

  19

  In October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux to film an interview for the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Of its many topics and themes I have selected a few for reproduction in this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comes from a carefully executed and beautifully bound Ahnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by my German publisher Heinrich Maria LedigRowohlt.

  ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE

  We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example «applied time» — time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the «passage of time», we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.

  He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being «an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration», of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, «in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum». He also is aware that «Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors».

  Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion — and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.

  PERSONAL PAST

  Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction. The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic recombination of actual events. The bad memoirist retouches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.

  ANCESTRAL PAST

  It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing one's past. And that means probing not only one's personal past but the past of one's family in search of affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions to one's vivid and vigorous Now. This, of course, is a game for old people. Tracing an ancestor to his lair hardly differs from a boy's search for a bird's nest or for a ball lost in the grass. The Christmas tree of one's childhood is replaced by the Family Tree.

  As the author of several papers on Lepidoptera, such as the «Nearclic Members of the Genus Lycaeides», I experience a certain thrill on finding that my mother's maternal grandfather Nikolay Kozlov, who was born two centuries ago and was the first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine, wrote a paper entitled «On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane» to which my *Nearctic Members et cetera*, furnishes a perfect response. And no less perfect is the connection between Nabokov's Pug, a little American moth named after me, and Nabokov's River in Nova Zembla of all places, so named after my great-grandfather, who parti
cipated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in an arctic expedition. I learned about these things quite late in life. Talks about one's ancestors were frowned upon in my family; the interdiction came from my father who had a particular loathing for the least speck or shadow of snobbishness. When imagining the information that I could now have used in my memoir, I rather regret that no such talks took place. But it simply was not done in our home, sixty years ago, twelve hundred miles away.

  FAMILY TREE

  My father Vladimir Nabokov was a liberal statesman, member of the first Russian parliament, champion of justice and law in a difficult empire. He was born in 1870, went into exile in 1919, and three years later, in Berlin, was assassinated by two Fascist thugs while he was trying to shield his friend Professor Milyukov.

  The Nabokov family's estate was adjacent to that of the Rukavishnikovs in the Government of St. Petersburg. My mother Helen (18761939) was the daughter of Ivan Rukavishnikov, country gentleman and philanthropist.

  My paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (18271904) was State Minister of Justice for eight years (18781885) under two tsars.

  My grandmother's paternal ancestors, the von Korffs, are traceable to the fourteenth century, while on their distaff side there is a long line of von Tiesenhausens, one of whose ancestors was Engelbrecht von Tiesenhausen of Liyland who took part, around 1200, in the Third and Fourth Crusades. Another direct ancestor of mine was Can Grande della Scala, Prince of Verona, who sheltered the exiled Dante Alighieri, and whose blazon (two big dogs holding a ladder) adorns Boccaccio's Decameron (1353). Della Scala's granddaughter Beatrice married, in 1370, Wilhelm Count Oettingen, grandson of fat Bolko the Third, Duke of Silesia. Their daughter married a von Waldburg, and three Waldburgs, one Kittlitz, two Polenzes and ten Osten-Sackens later, Wilhelm Carl von Korff and Eleonor von der Osten-Sacken engendered my paternal grandmother's grandfather, Nicolaus, killed in battle on June 12, 1812. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother Antoinette Graun, was the granddaughter of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun (1701-1759).