Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in
Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of
Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of
hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem
impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their
son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items
are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita, other books,
sporting equipment, an American flag.
Nabokov arises early in the morning and works. He does his
writing on filing cards, which are gradually copied, expanded, and rearranged
until they become his novels. During the warm season in Montreux he likes to
take the sun and swim at a pool in a garden near the hotel. His appearance at
sixty-eight is heavy, slow, and powerful. He is easily turned to both amusement
and annoyance, but prefers the former. His wife, an unequivocally devoted
collaborator, is vigilant over him, writing his letters, taking care of
business, occasionally even interrupting him when she feels he is saying the
wrong thing. She is an exceptionally good-looking, trim, and sober-eyed woman.
The Nabokovs still go off on frequent butterfly-hunting trips, though the
distances they travel are limited by the fact that they dislike flying.
The interviewer had sent ahead a number of questions. When he
arrived at the Montreux Palace, he found an envelope waiting for him—the
questions had been shaken up and transformed into an interview. A few questions
and answers were added later, before the interview's appearance in the 1967
Summer/Fall issue of The Paris Review. In accordance with Nabokov's
wishes, all answers are given as he wrote them down. He claims that he needs to
write his responses because of his unfamiliarity with English; this is a
constant seriocomic form of teasing. He speaks with a dramatic Cambridge
accent, very slightly nuanced by an occasional Russian pronunciation. Spoken
English is, in fact, no hazard to him. Misquotation, however, is a menace.
There is no doubt that Nabokov feels as a tragic loss the conspiracy of history
that deprived him of his native Russia, and that brought him in middle life to
doing his life's work in a language that is not that of his first dreams.
However, his frequent apologies for his grasp of English clearly belong in the
context of Nabokov's special mournful joking: he means it, he does not mean it,
he is grieving for his loss, he is outraged if anyone criticizes his style, he
pretends to be just a poor lonely foreigner, he is as American “as April in
Arizona.”
Nabokov is now at work on a long novel that explores the
mysteries and ambiguities of time. When he speaks of this book, his voice and
gaze are those of a delighted and bemused young poet eager to get to the task.
Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd
questions.
Good morning. I am ready.
Your sense of the immorality of the
relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood
and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and
girls very little older than Lolita. They marry—to no particular public
outrage; rather, public cooing.
No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert
Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He
cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or
elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens
or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond
of “little girls”—not simply “young girls.” Nymphets are girl-children, not
starlets and “sex kittens.” Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met
her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his
“aging mistress.”
One critic (Pryce-Jones) has said
about you that “his feelings are like no one else's.” Does this make sense to
you? Or does it mean that you know your feelings better than others know
theirs? Or that you have discovered yourself at other levels? Or simply that
your history is unique?
I do not recall that article; but if a critic makes such a statement, it
must surely mean that he has explored the feelings of literally millions of
people, in at least three countries, before reaching his conclusion. If so, I
am a rare fowl indeed. If, on the other hand, he has merely limited himself to
quizzing members of his family or club, his statement cannot be discussed
seriously.
Another critic has written that your
“worlds are static. They may become tense with obsession, but they do not break
apart like the worlds of everyday reality.” Do you agree? Is there a static
quality in your view of things?
Whose “reality”? “Everyday” where? Let me suggest that the very term
“everyday reality” is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is
permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known. I suspect
you have invented that expert on “everyday reality.” Neither exists.
He does [names him]. A third critic has said that you “diminish” your characters “to the
point where they become ciphers in a cosmic farce.” I disagree; Humbert, while
comic, retains a touching and insistent quality—that of the spoiled artist.
I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who
manages to appear “touching.” That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense,
can only apply to my poor little girl. Besides, how can I “diminish” to the
level of ciphers, et cetera, characters that I have invented myself? One can
“diminish” a biographee, but not an eidolon.
E. M. Forster speaks of his major
characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this
ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?
My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I
dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about
characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course
one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that
trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.
Clarence Brown of Princeton has
pointed out striking similarities in your work. He refers to you as “extremely
repetitious” and that in wildly different ways you are in essence saying the
same thing. He speaks of fate being the “muse of Nabokov.” Are you consciously
aware of “repeating yourself,” or to put it another way, that you strive for a
conscious unity to your shelf of books?
I do not think I have seen Clarence Brown's essay, but he may have something
there. Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past
and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.
Do you think literary criticism is at
all purposeful? Either in general, or specifically about your own books? Is it
ever instructive?
The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or
has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers,
including the author of the book, some information about the critic's
intelligence, or honesty, or both.
And the function of the editor? Has one
ever had literary advice to offer?
By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid
creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a
semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often
is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would
attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”
Are you a lepidopterist, stalking your
victims? If so, doesn't your laughter startle them?
On the contrary, it lulls them into the state of torpid security which an
insect experiences when mimicking a dead leaf. Though by no means an avid
reader of reviews dealing with my own stuff, I happen to remember the essay by
a young lady who attempted to find entomological symbols in my fiction. The
essay might have been amusing had she known something about Lepidoptera. Alas,
she revealed complete ignorance, and the muddle of terms she employed proved to
be only jarring and absurd.
How would you define your alienation
from the so-called White Russian refugees?
Well, historically I am a “White Russian” myself since all Russians who left
Russia as my family did in the first years of the Bolshevik tyranny because of
their opposition to it were and remained White Russians in the large sense. But
these refugees were split into as many social fractions and political factions
as was the entire nation before the Bolshevist coup. I do not mix with
“Black-Hundred” White Russians and do not mix with the so-called
“bolshevizans,” that is “pinks.” On the other hand, I have friends among
intellectual Constitutional Monarchists as well as among intellectual Social
Revolutionaries. My father was an old-fashioned liberal, and I do not mind
being labeled an old-fashioned liberal, too.
How would you define your alienation
from present-day Russia?
As a deep distrust of the phony thaw now advertised. As a constant awareness
of unredeemable iniquities. As a complete indifference to all that moves a
patriotic Sovietski man of today. As the keen satisfaction of having
discerned as early as 1918 (nineteen eighteen) the meshchantsvo (petty
bourgeois smugness, Philistine essence) of Leninism.
How do you now regard the poets Blok
and Mandelshtam and others who were writing in the days before you left Russia?
I read them in my boyhood, more than a half century ago. Ever since that
time I have remained passionately fond of Blok's lyrics. His long pieces are
weak, and the famous The Twelve is dreadful, self-consciously couched
in a phony “primitive” tone, with a pink cardboard Jesus Christ glued on at the
end. As to Mandelstam, I also knew him by heart, but he gave me a less fervent
pleasure. Today, through the prism of a tragic fate, his poetry seems greater
than it actually is. I note incidentally that professors of literature still
assign these two poets to different schools. There is only one school: that of
talent.
I know your work has been read and is
attacked in the Soviet Union. How would you feel about a Soviet edition of your
work?
Oh, they are welcome to my work. As a matter of fact, the Editions Victor
are bringing out my Invitation to a Beheading in a reprint of the
original Russian of 1938, and a New York publisher (Phaedra) is printing my
Russian translation of Lolita. I am sure the Soviet Government will be
happy to admit officially a novel that seems to contain a prophecy of Hitler's
regime, and a novel that condemns bitterly the American system of motels.
Have you ever had contact with Soviet
citizens? Of what sort?
I have practically no contact with them, though I did once agree, in the
early thirties or late twenties, to meet—out of sheer curiosity—an agent from Bolshevist
Russia who was trying hard to get émigré writers and artists to return to the
fold. He had a double name, Lebedev something, and had written a novelette
entitled Chocolate, and I thought I might have some sport with him. I
asked him would I be permitted to write freely and would I be able to leave
Russia if I did not like it there. He said that I would be so busy liking it
there that I would have no time to dream of going abroad again. I would, he
said, be perfectly free to choose any of the many themes Soviet Russia
bountifully allows a writer to use, such as farms, factories, forests in
Fakistan—oh, lots of fascinating subjects. I said farms, et cetera, bored me,
and my wretched seducer soon gave up. He had better luck with the composer
Prokofiev.
Do you consider yourself an American?
Yes, I do. I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the
air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia. Of
course, I owe too much to the Russian language and landscape to be emotionally
involved in, say, American regional literature, or Indian dances, or pumpkin
pie on a spiritual plane; but I do feel a suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride
when I show my green USA passport at European frontiers. Crude criticism of
American affairs offends and distresses me. In home politics I am strongly
antisegregationist. In foreign policy, I am definitely on the government's
side. And when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that
line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.
Is there a community of which you
consider yourself a part?
Not really. I can mentally collect quite a large number of individuals whom
I am fond of, but they would form a very disparate and discordant group if
gathered in real life, on a real island. Otherwise, I would say that I am
fairly comfortable in the company of American intellectuals who have read my
books.
What is your opinion of the academic
world as a milieu for the creative writer? Could you speak specifically of the
value or detriment of your teaching at Cornell?
A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine
milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I
remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a
transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he
was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that
three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man
multitude.
Would you describe your relationship
with the contemporary literary community? With Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy,
your magazine editors and book publishers?
The only time I ever collaborated with any writer was when I translated with
Edmund Wilson Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri for The New Republic
twenty-five years ago, a rather paradoxical recollection in view of his making
such a fool of himself last year when he had the audacity of questioning my
understanding of Eugene Onegin. Mary McCarthy, on the other hand, has
been very kind to me recently in the same New Republic, although I do
think she added quite a bit of her own angelica to the pale fire of Kinbote's
plum pudding. I prefer not to mention here my relationship with Girodias, but I
have answered in Evergreen his scurvy article in the Olympia
anthology. Otherwise, I am on excellent terms with all my publishers. My warm
friendship with Katharine White and Bill Maxwell of The New Yorker is
something the most arrogant author cannot evoke without gratitude and delight.
Could you say something of your work
habits? Do you write to a preplanned chart? Do you jump from one section to
another, or do you move from the beginning through to the end?
The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the
crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards
until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular
about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard,
pencils capped with erasers.
Is there a particular picture of the
world which you wish to develop? The past is very present for you, even in a novel
of the “future,” such as Bend Sinister. Are
you a “nostalgist”? In what time would you prefer to live?
In the coming days of silent planes and graceful aircycles, and cloudless
silvery skies, and a universal system of padded underground roads to which
trucks shall be relegated like Morlocks. As to the past, I would not mind
retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as
baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
You know, you do not have to answer all my Kinbote-like questions.
It would never do to start skipping the tricky ones. Let us continue.
Besides writing novels, what do you,
or would you, like most to do?
Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and
rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a
new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in
Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia,
I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any
novels at all.
What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there
temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?
“Poshlust,” or in a better
transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not
described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can
ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés,
Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities,
crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples.
Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must
look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment,
humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and
the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such
concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany's
guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as
“the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue”
(as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied
to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is
seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one
Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews
are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays.
Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist.
One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art
Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools
of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos,
polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls.
There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract
artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as
corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine
Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody
has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the
snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically
the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death
in Venice. You see the range.
Are there contemporary writers you
follow with great pleasure?
There are several such writers, but I shall not name them. Anonymous
pleasure hurts nobody.
Do you follow some with great pain?
No. Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are
engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete
nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner,
Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion
of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great
literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the
pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr.
Schweitzer in some homes.
As an admirer of Borges and Joyce you
seem to share their pleasure in teasing the reader with tricks and puns and
puzzles. What do you think the relationship should be between reader and
author?
I do not recollect any puns in Borges, but then I read him only in
translation. Anyway, his delicate little tales and miniature Minotaurs have nothing
in common with Joyce's great machines. Nor do I find many puzzles in that most
lucid of novels, Ulysses. On the other hand, I detest Punningans
Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the
dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.
What have you learned from Joyce?
Nothing.
Oh, come.
James Joyce has not influenced me in any manner whatsoever. My first brief
contact with Ulysses was around 1920 at Cambridge University, when a
friend, Peter Mrozovski, who had brought a copy from Paris, chanced to read to
me, as he stomped up and down my digs, one or two spicy passages from Molly's
monologue, which, entre nous soit dit, is the weakest chapter in the
book. Only fifteen years later, when I was already well formed as a writer and
reluctant to learn or unlearn anything, I read Ulysses and liked it
enormously. I am indifferent to Finnegans Wake as I am to all regional
literature written in dialect—even if it be the dialect of genius.
Aren't you doing a book about James
Joyce?
But not only about him. What I intend to do is publish a number of
twenty-page essays on several works—Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation,
Don Quixote, and others—all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I
remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old
book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and
embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.
What about other influences? Pushkin?
In a way—no more than, say, Tolstoy or Turgenev were influenced by the pride
and purity of Pushkin's art.
Gogol?
I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is
dubious and dangerous. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a
worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable.
Anyone else?
H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy. The
Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind,
all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad or, in fact,
any of Wells's contemporaries could produce. His sociological cogitations can
be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb. There
was an awful moment at dinner in our St. Petersburg house one night when
Zinaïda Vengerov, his translator, informed Wells, with a toss of her head: “You
know, my favorite work of yours is The Lost World.” “She means
the war the Martians lost,” said my father quickly.
Did you learn from your students at
Cornell? Was the experience purely a financial one? Did teaching teach you
anything valuable?
My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best,
they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations. Every lecture I
delivered had been carefully, lovingly handwritten and typed out, and I
leisurely read it out in class, sometimes stopping to rewrite a sentence and
sometimes repeating a paragraph—a mnemonic prod which, however, seldom provoked
any change in the rhythm of wrists taking it down. I welcomed the few shorthand
experts in my audience, hoping they would communicate the information they
stored to their less fortunate comrades. Vainly I tried to replace my
appearances at the lectern by taped records to be played over the college
radio. On the other hand, I deeply enjoyed the chuckle of appreciation in this
or that warm spot of the lecture hall at this or that point of my lecture. My
best reward comes from those former students of mine who, ten or fifteen years
later, write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I
taught them to visualize Emma Bovary's mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement
of rooms in the Samsa household or the two homosexuals in Anna Karenina.
I do not know if I learned anything from teaching, but I know I amassed an
invaluable amount of exciting information in analyzing a dozen novels for my
students. My salary as you happen to know was not exactly a princely one.
Is there anything you would care to
say about the collaboration your wife has given you?
She presided as adviser and judge over the making of my first fiction in the
early twenties. I have read to her all my stories and novels at least twice;
and she has reread them all when typing them and correcting proofs and checking
translations into several languages. One day in 1950, at Ithaca, New York, she
was responsible for stopping me and urging delay and second thoughts as, beset
with technical difficulties and doubts, I was carrying the first chapters of Lolita
to the garden incinerator.
What is your relation to the
translations of your books?
In the case of languages my wife and I know or can read—English, Russian,
French, and to a certain extent German and Italian—the system is a strict
checking of every sentence. In the case of Japanese or Turkish versions, I try
not to imagine the disasters that probably bespatter every page.
What are your plans for future work?
I am writing a new novel, but of this I cannot speak. Another project I have
been nursing for some time is the publication of the complete screenplay of Lolita
that I made for Kubrick. Although there are just enough borrowings from it in
his version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the film is
only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down
scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not
wish to imply that Kubrick's film is mediocre; in its own right, it is
first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlost is often
given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass.
Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never
understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity;
but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its
original form.
If you had the choice of one and only
one book by which you would be remembered, which one would it be?
The one I am writing or rather dreaming of writing. Actually, I shall be
remembered by Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin.
Do you feel you have any conspicuous
or secret flaw as a writer?
The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of
the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use,
and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the
excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually
after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have
always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for
describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax
and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse
and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.
What do you think about the
contemporary competitive ranking of writers?
Yes, I have noticed that in this respect our professional book reviewers are
veritable bookmakers. Who's in, who's out, and where are the snows of
yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can
decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an
ageless international freak.
What is your great regret in your
career?
That I did not come earlier to America. I would have liked to have
lived in New York
in the thirties. Had my Russian novels been translated then, they might have
provided a shock and a lesson for pro-Soviet enthusiasts.
Are there significant disadvantages to
your present fame?
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist
with an unpronounceable name.
Theo Paris review
