Of
the fifty-eight questions James
Mossman submitted on September 8, 1969,
for
Review, BBC-2 (October 4) some 40 were
answered and recorded
by me
from written
cards in Montreux.
The Listener published
the thing
in an incomplete form
on October 23 of that year. Printed here from my
final
typescript.
You have said that you explored time's
prison and have
found
no way out. Are you still exploring, and is it inevitably
a solitary
excursion, from which one returns to the solace of
others?
I'm a very poor speaker. I hope our
audience won't mind my
using
notes.
My exploration of time's prison as
described in the first
chapter of Speak, Memory
was only a stylistic device
meant
to introduce my subject.
Memory often presents a life broken
into episodes, more
or
less perfectly recalled. Do you
see any themes
working
through
from one episode to another?
Everyone
can sort out
convenient patterns of related
themes
in the past development of his life. Here again I had to
provide
pegs and echoes when furnishing my reception halls.
Is the strongest tie between men this
common captivity
in
time?
Let
us not generalize.
The common captivity in time is
felt
differently by different people, and some people may
not
feel it
at all. Generalizations are
full of loopholes and
traps. I
know elderly men
for whom "time" only
means
"timepiece."
What distinguishes us from animals?
Being
aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I
not
only know that I am but also know that
I know it,
then I belong to the human species. All the rest
follows-- the
glory
of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe.
In that
respect, the
gap between ape and man is
immeasurably greater
than
the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an
ape's memory
and human memory
is the difference between an
ampersand
and the British Museum library.
Judging
from your own awakening
consciousness as a
child, do you think that the capacity to use
language, syntax,
relate
ideas, is something we learn from adults, as if we were
computers being
programed, or do we
begin to use a unique,
built-in
capability of our own-- call it imagination?
The stupidest person in the world is
an all-round genius
compared
to the cleverest computer. How we learn to imagine and
express things is a riddle with premises impossible
to express
and
a solution impossible to imagine.
In your acute scrutiny of your past,
can you find the
instruments
that fashioned you?
Yes-- unless I refashion them
retrospectively, by the very
act
of evoking them. There is quite a lot of give and take
in
the
game of metaphors.
As you recall a patch of
time, its shapes,
sounds,
colors, and
occupants, does this complete picture help combat
time
or offer any clue to its mysteries, or is it pleasure that
it
affords?
Let
me quote a
paragraph in my
book Ada:
"Physiologically the
sense of Time is a sense of continuous
becoming.
. . . Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but
memory
in the making. In every individual life there
goes on,
from cradle to deathbed, the gradual shaping and
strengthening
of
that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of
the strong."
This is Van
speaking, Van Veen, the charming
villain
of mv book. I have not decided yet if I agree with him
in
all his view's on the texture of time. I suspect I don't.
Does
the inevitable distortion
of detail worry you?
Not at all. The distortion of a remembered
image may not
only enhance
its beauty with an added refraction, but provide
informative
links with earlier or later patches of the past.
You've said that the
man in you
revolts sometimes
against
the fictionist. Can you say why? (Note: I'm thinking of
your
regret at giving items of your past to characters.)
One
hates oneself for leaving a pet with a neighbor and
never
returning for it.
Doesn't giving away past memories to
your characters
alleviate
the burden of the past?
Items
of one's past are apt to fade from exposure. They
are
like those richly pigmented butterflies and moths which the
ignorant
amateur hangs up in a display case on the wall of his
sunny parlor
and which, after a few years, are
bleached to a
pitiful
drab hue. The metallic blue of
so-called structural
wing scales
is hardier, but even so a wise collector should
keep
specimens in the dry dark of a cabinet.
You have written of yourself as
looking out "from
my
present ridge
of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time. "
Why
uninhabited?
Well, for the same reason that a desert
island is a more
deserving island
than one with a footprint initialing its
beach.
Moreover, "uninhabited" makes direct sense here,
since
most
of my former companions are gone.
Does
the aristocrat in you despise the
fictionist, or
is
it only English aristocrats who feel
queasy about men of
letters?
Pushkin,
professional poet and Russian
nobleman, used to
shock
the beau monde by declaring that he wrote for his
own pleasure
but published for
the sake of
money- I do
likewise,
but have never shocked anybody-- except,
perhaps, a
former publisher
of mine who
used to counter my indignant
requests
by saying that I'm much too good a
writer to need
extravagant
advances.
Is
the capacity to recall and to
celebrate patches of
past
time a special quality of yours?
No, I don't think so. I could name many
writers, English,
Russian, and
French, who have done it at least as well as I
have.
Funny, I notice that when mentioning my three tongues, I
list them
in that order
because it is the
best rhythmic
arrangement: either
dactylic, with one
syllable skipped,
"English, Russian,
and French," or
anapestic, "English,
Russian,
and French." Little lesson in prosody.
Have
you ever experienced
hallucinations or heard
voices or had visions, and if so, have they been
illuminating?
When about to fall asleep after a good
deal of writing or
reading, I
often enjoy, if that is the right
word, what some
drug
addicts experience-- a continuous series of
extraordinary
bright, fluidly
changing pictures. Their
type is different
nightly,
but on a given night it remains the same: one night it
may be
a banal kaleidoscope
of endlessly recombined
and
reshaped
stained-window designs; next time, comes a subhuman or
superhuman face
with a formidably growing blue eye; or, and
this
is the most striking type, I see in realistic
detail a
long-dead friend
turning toward me and melting into another
remembered
figure against the black velvet of my eyelids' inner
side.
As to voices, I have described in Speak,
Memory
the
snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my
pillowed
ear. Reports on those enigmatic phenomena can be found
in the
case histories collected
by psychiatrists but no
satisfying
interpretation has come my way. Freudians, keep out,
please.
Your best memories seem to be golden
days, with great
green trees,
splashes of sun on venerable
stone, harmony-- a
world
in which people were going to live
for ever. Do you
manipulate the
past in order
to combat life
at its less
harmonious?
My existence has always remained as
harmonious and green
as
it was throughout the span dealt with in my memoirs, that is
from 1903
to 1940. The emotions of my
Russian childhood have
been
replaced by new excitements, by new mountains explored in
search of new
butterflies, by a cloudless family life, and by
the
monstrous delights of novelistic invention.
Is
writing your novels pleasure or drudgery?
Pleasure and agony while composing the
book in
my mind;
harrowing irritation
when struggling with
my tools and
viscera--
the pencil that needs resharpening, the card that has
to
be rewritten, the bladder that has to be drained, the
word
that I
always misspell and always have to look up. Then the
labor
of reading the typescript prepared by
a secretary, the
correction of
my ma)or mistakes
and her minor
ones,
transferring
corrections to other copies,
misplacing pages,
trying to
remember something that
had to be crossed out or
inserted.
Repeating the process when proofreading.
Unpacking
the radiant
beautiful plump advance
copy, opening it-- and
discovering
a stupid oversight committed by me, allowed
by me
to survive. After a month or so I get used to
the book's final
stage,
to its having been weaned from my brain. I now regard it
with
a kind of amused tenderness as a man regards not his son,
but
the young wife of his son.
You say you are not interested in what
critics say, yet
you
got very
angry with Edmund Wilson once for
commenting on
you,
and let off some heavy field guns at
him, not to say
multiple
rockets. You must have cared.
I
never retaliate when
my works of art are concerned.
There
the arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone
pierce, the
shield of what
disappointed archers call
my
"self-assurance." But
I do reach for my heaviest dictionary
when
my scholarship is questioned, as was the case with my old
friend Edmund Wilson, and I do get annoyed when
people I never
met
impinge on my privacy with false and
vulgar assumptions--
as for
example Mr. Updike, who in
an otherwise clever
article
absurdly suggests that my fictional
character, bitchy
and lewd
Ada, is, I quote, "in a
dimension or two, Nabokov's
wife."
I might add that I collect clippings--
for information
and
entertainment.
Do
you see yourself
sometimes as Nabokov the writer
isolated from
others, flaming sword
to scourge them,
an
entertainer,
a drudge, a genius, which?
The
word "genius" is
passed around rather generously,
isn't
it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart,
geniy, is
a term brimming with a sort of throaty
aw^e
and
is used only in the case of a very small number of writers,
Shakespeare, Milton,
Pushkin, Tolstoy. To such deeply beloved
authors
as Turgenev and Chekhov Russians assign
the thinner
term, talвnt, talent,
not genius. It
is a bizarre
example
of semantic discrepancy-- the same
word being more
substantial in
one language than
in another. Although my
Russian
and my English are practically
coeval, О still
feel
appalled and
puzzled at seeing
"genius" applied to any
important
storyteller, such as Maupassant or Maugham.
Genius
still means
to me, in my Russian
fastidiousness and pride of
phrase,
a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not
the
talent of Henry James. I'm afriad I have lost the thread of
my
reply to your question. What is your next one, please?
Can political ideas solve any of the
big problems of an
individual's
life?
I have always marveled at the neatness of
such solutions:
ardent Stalinists
transforming themselves into
harmless
Socialists,
Socialists finding a sunset harbor in Conservatism,
and
so forth. I suppose this must be
rather like religious
conversion, of
which I know very little. I can only explain
God's
popularity by an atheist's panic.
Why do you say you dislike
"serious" writers? Don't you
just
mean "bad" artists?
Let me put it this way. By inclination and
intent I avoid
squandering my
art on the
illustrated catalogues of solemn
notions
and serious opinions; and I dislike
their pervasive
presence
in the works of others. What ideas can be traced in my
novels belong
to my creatures therein and may be deliberately
flawed.
In my
memoirs, quotable ideas
are merely passing
visions, suggestions,
mirages of the
mind. They lose their
colors
or explode like football fish when
lifted out of the
context
of their tropical sea.
Great
writers have had
strong political and
sociological
preferences or ideas. Tolstoy was
one. Does the
presence of
such ideas in his work make you think the less of
him?
I
go by books,
not by authors.
I consider Anna
Karenin the
supreme masterpiece of
nineteenth-century
literature;
it is closely followed by The
Death of Ivan
llyich. I
detest Resurrection and The Kreuzer
Sonata.
Tolstoy's publicistic forays are unreadable. War
and
Peace, though a little
too long, is
a rollicking
historical novel
written for that amor-phic and limp creature
known
as "the general reader," and more
specifically for the
young.
In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I
derive no
pleasure from its
cumbersome message, from the
didactic
interludes, from the artificial
coincidences, with
cool Prince
Audrey turning up to witness
this or that
historical
moment, this or that footnote in
the sources used
often
uncritically by the author.
Why do you dislike writers who go in
for soul-searching
and
self-revelations in print? After all, do you not do it at
another
remove, bebind a thicket of art?
If you are alluding to Dostoevski's worst
novels, then,
indeed, I
dislike intensely The Karamazov Brothers and
the
ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not
object
to soul-searching and self-revelation, but
in those
books the
soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the
journalese,
hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.
Is your attachment to childhood
specially nostalgic and
intense
because you were abruptly and forever banished from the
place
where it evolved by the Russian Revolution?
Yes, that's right. But
the stress is
not on Russian
Revolution. It
could have been
anything, an earthquake, an
illness, an individual departure
prompted by a
private
disaster.
The accent is on the abruptness of the change.
Would
you ever try to
go back there, just to have a
look?
There's nothing to look at. New
tenement houses and
old
churches do not
interest me. The hotels there are terrible. I
detest
the Soviet theater. Any palace in Italy is
superior to
the repainted
abodes of the
Tsars. The village huts in the
forbidden
hinterland are- as dismally poor as ever,
and the
wretched peasant
flogs his wretched cart horse
with the same
wretched
zest. As to my special northern
landscape and the
haunts of my childhood-- well, I would not wish to
contaminate
their
images preserved in my mind.
How would you define your
alienation from present-day
Russia? I
loathe and despise dictatorships.
You called the Revolution there
"trite. " Why?
Because
it followed the
banal historical pattern
of
bloodshed,
deceit, and oppression, because
it betrayed the
democratic
dream,
and because all it can promise the Soviet
citizen
is the material article, second-hand Philistine values,
imitation
of Western foods and gadgets, and of
course, caviar
for
the decorated general.
Why do you live in hotels?
It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance
of
private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit-- the
habit
of freedom.
Do you have a longing for one place
ever, a
place in
which family
or racial continuity
has been witnessed for
generations,
a scrap of Russia in return for the whole
of the
United
States? I have no such longings.
Is nostalgia debilitating or enriching?
Neither. It's one of a thousand tender
emotions.
Do you like being an American citizen?
Yes, very much so.
Did you sit up to watch the Americans
land on the moon?
Were
you impressed?
Oh,
"impressed" is not the
right word! Treading the soil
of
the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my
projected self
imagines),
the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced
in the
history of discovery.
Of course, I rented a
television set
to watch every
moment of their
marvelous
adventure.
That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward
suits the
two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar
gravity
was a lovely sight. It was also a moment
when a flag
means to
one more than a flag usually
does. I am puzzled and
pained
by the fact that
the English weeklies
ignored the
absolutely overwhelming
excitement of the
adventure, the
strange sensual
exhilaration of palpating
those precious
pebbles, of
seeing our marbled
globe in the black sky, of
feeling
along one's spine the shiver and wonder
of it. After
all, Englishmen
should understand that thrill,
they who have
been
the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such
irrelevant
matters as wasted dollars and power politics?
If
you ruled any modern industrial state absolutely,
what
would you abolish?
I would abolish trucks and transistors, I
would outlaw the
diabolical
roar of motorcycles, I would wring the neck of
soft
music in
public places. I would banish the
bidet from
hotel
bathrooms so as to make more room for a longer bathtub. I
would
forbid farmers the use of insecticides and allow them to
mow their
meadows only once a year,
in late August when
everyone
has safely pupated.
Do you like reading newspapers?
Yes, especially the Sunday papers.
You refer somewhere to your father's
study teaching you
to
appreciate authentic poetry. Is any living poet authentic to
you
now?
I used to have a veritable passion for
poetry, English,
Russian, and
French. That passion started to dwindle around
1940
when I stopped gorging myself on contemporary
verse. I
know
as little about today's poetry as about new music.
Are too many people writing novels?
I
read quite a
number of them every year. For some odd
reason
what authors and publishers keep
sending me is the
pseudo-picaresque stuff
of clichй characters and the enlarged
pores
of dirty words.
You parody the poet W. H. Auden in your
novel Ada,
I
think. Why do you think so little of him?
I
do not parody Mr. Auden anywhere in Ada. I'm not
sufficiently
familiar with his poetry for that.
I do know,
however, a few
of his translations-- and deplore the blunders
he
so lightheartedly permits himself. Robert Lowell, of course,
is
the greater offender.
Ada has a lot of word play,
punning, parody-- do you
acknowledge influence
by James Joyce
in your literary
upbringing,
and do you admire him?
I played with words long before
I read Ulysses.
Yes, I
love that book
but it is
rather the lucidity and
precision
of its prose that pleases me. The real
puns are in
Fmnegans
Wake-- a tragic failure and a frightful bore.
What
about Kafka's work,
and Gogol's. I am sniffing
about
for early influences.
Every Russian writer owes something to
Gogol, Pushkin, and
Shakespeare.
Some Russian writers, as for example
Pushkin and
Gogol, were
influenced by Byron
and Sterne in
French
translation.
I do not know German and so could not
read Kafka
before the
nineteen thirties when his La
metamorphose
appeared
in La nouvelle revue franзaise, and
by that
time
many of my so-called "kafkaesque" stories had already been
published. Alas,
I am not
one to provide
much sport for
influence
hunters.
Tolstoy said, so they say, that life
was a "tartine de
merde"
which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?
I've
never heard that
story. The old boy was sometimes
rather
disgusting, wasn't he? My own life is fresh
bread with
country
butter and Alpine honey.
Which is the worst thing men do? (Note:
I'm thinking of
your
remark about cruelty).
To stink, to cheat, to torture.
Which is the best?
To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.
Theo
kulichki
