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. Rйgis hotel. I 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 particularly 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 well-meaning publishers keep
sending me - with "hope-you-will-like-it-as-much-as-we-do"
letters -- only one kind of
fiction: novels truffled with obscenities, fancy words, and would-be
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
"anti-novel" in France?
I am
not interested in
groups, movements, schools of
writing and so forth. I am interested only
in the individual artist. This "anti-novel" 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 (1919-1922). 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 Yorkerand 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 I 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 ten-yearlong 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 400, 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."
Theo kulichki
